by Rachel Lee
Once they moved out of the system or into a different part of the system, she fell out of the loop. She had gotten used to seeing small strides and then picking up a new case without ever seeing the ending. A lot of times, the family court held that everything was okay now, no more visits were needed, and that was the end.
But her commitment remained to do as much as she could with the time and tools she had. And she felt she could do so much more out here. See more of the kids, get to know them better, share their successes as well as their problems. Much more personal attention to each child than her job allowed. She needed a more positive environment herself, and she needed to provide a positive environment.
So yes, she was coming back. The question was about right now, and a shaft of anguish that seemed to hold her paralyzed with its force.
Her minefield?
With just those few words, he had skewed her entire self-perception. Her thoughts crawled around, trying to understand what he was talking about and what it meant about her.
God, this was bad. She had to do something. Anything.
Finally she moved, surprised at how much she had stiffened. Hours of sitting caused her body to whimper a minor protest as she stood. Somewhere inside she had been deadened to the passage of time, lost in a maelstrom of emotions and careening thoughts.
She had come out here expecting to say farewell to her aunt and close up the house. She had expected nothing of what had followed, from considering a career change to a major move...and Cliff. She had thought that avenue closed a long time ago. Now it had opened again, just long enough to pierce her.
Downstairs, she made a pot of coffee, certain that she would see the sun rise. Sleep hadn’t brushed her with the merest wing in all these hours. Her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten, either, but she ignored it.
Martha, never far from her thoughts, returned. Holly could have sworn she felt her aunt sit at the table with her. Could almost smell the lavender sachets she kept in her drawers, a custom Holly had always found quaint and pleasant, but something she had never done herself. A child of the modern age, she used dryer sheets and went around the world with her clothes smelling like nearly everyone else’s. But Martha had always smelled of lavender.
God, she wished her aunt were there. That they could have just one more conversation. Their last phone call had been just four days before Martha’s stroke. They had laughed. They had talked about Holly’s job. Martha had expressed her concern that Holly was sounding awfully tired and needed a break. Holly had promised a visit that summer.
Instead she had come early, to bury Martha. And what had she done with this time, time when she surely should have been grieving and recalling every memory she could about her aunt? Oh, she’d spent some time going through things, but mostly she had hidden from her grief, instead allowing herself to be distracted by planning for a future...and by Cliff.
Had she been hiding in his company to avoid the grief? Maybe. But if so, she’d gotten herself into a fine kettle of fresh pain.
God, she felt filthier than she had after that manhandling by those three guys in Chicago. Never, ever, would she have believed Cliff capable of such cruelty, to make love to her while resuming his relationship with his ex. She might have deserved it, but she had believed it was out of character for him.
She looked at the phone, thinking about calling one of her friends. It might help to talk, but God, it was a conversation she didn’t want to have with any one of them. They’d get righteously indignant for her, and that wouldn’t help. Or worse, they’d try to make kind excuses, whether for him or her. None of it would mend this pain.
But once she had looked at the phone, she couldn’t stop remembering what Cliff had said about leaving messages. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear them. Her mind was capable of writing the kiss-off. Thanks for a great lay, but... Or, now that Lisa’s back....
Bitterness filled her mouth. But the phone wouldn’t leave her alone. The more she tried not to look at it, the more it seemed to pull her gaze. She could almost hear Martha saying one of her favorite phrases, always funny coming out of Martha’s mouth: Man up.
Boy, how she used to laugh at that, and Martha’s brown eyes would sparkle with humor. She could almost see them sparkling at her right now, even though there wasn’t one bit of humor in this situation.
So man up, she thought. She probably wouldn’t be able to get the messages anyway. That beeping wouldn’t tell her how to dial.
But Martha had been meticulous in a lot of ways, and when Holly leaned toward the phone, she saw a list of names, neatly printed, and down near the bottom, next to a button, was voice mail.
It couldn’t be that easy. Clenching her teeth but deciding to face the music and put an end to at least some of the questions that gnawed at her mind and heart like starving mice, she picked up the receiver and punched the button.
Immediately, she heard a voice say, “Please enter your pass code.”
She didn’t know the pass code. How would she? Useless. She started to pull the receiver from her ear when she heard a series of five tones. Was it automatically dialing the code?
Apparently so. After another second, the recorded woman’s voice spoke again. “Please press one to hear your messages...”
She pressed one and listened. They came to her in reverse order, newest first.
“Holly?” Cliff’s voice said. “I’m beginning to worry. Are you okay? You haven’t called me back. Did I do something? I hope I can get over there soon. Call me, please.”
The second: “I’m sorry I haven’t been over. Maybe you can run over here if you want to see the downside of ranching. The lambs are still sick and we’re running a twenty-four-hour hospital. Miss you.”
And the earliest: “I’m glad you liked the roses. I wish I could get over there, but something’s wrong with some of my lambs. It’s pretty bad, and we’re nursing them. Waiting for the vet. I hope like hell he can figure it out before we start losing them. Call or come over when you can. I miss you.”
When she hung up the phone, she felt about two inches tall.
But Lisa said she’d been over there. What the hell had Lisa been doing over there? Not even in her worst imaginings could she believe Cliff would have called her three times, talking about sick lambs, if he was getting back into a relationship with his ex.
Now she had some idea what he had meant by a minefield. Her insides wrenched, nerves made her jump up and she wondered how in the hell she could fix this mess.
* * *
Cliff stood by the fold as the sun came up, watching the lambs. They were on their feet again, if a little unsteady, and nursing again. Whatever had hit so many of his lambs hadn’t spread any farther. Mike Windwalker, the vet, wasn’t sure what had happened, and had sent blood and tissue samples off to a lab somewhere, along with vaccine and wormer samples. Cliff didn’t care if the cause had a name, although he supposed it would be good to know whether they’d had a bad reaction to the worming or vaccinations or if they’d had a bug of some kind.
Right now he was just glad they were recovering. Whether that recovery was due to time or the broad-spectrum antibiotics the vet had given them, he hadn’t a clue.
He was just glad that nightmare was over. Everyone on the ranch, including Jean, had taken a turn at milking the ewes and trying to bottle-feed the lambs. For a while they’d been too weak to suckle, but when he and his helpers had squeezed the milk into their mouths, at least they had swallowed whatever didn’t just run right out.
He should have been shouting hallelujahs. Hell, he’d wanted to share his joy when he’d gone over to see Holly last night. Instead, he’d been treated like a cow patty she wanted to scrape from her boot. Nice.
She’d done that to him once before, but at least he’d understood her reasons last time. This time he didn’t care wh
at her reasons might be. He had had enough.
Satisfied that the lambs were continuing to mend, he couldn’t squash his anger anymore. Damn woman was a walking honey trap. He’d been the one who had warned her they shouldn’t play with fire, then he’d gone right ahead and played with it. Idiot!
Maybe he’d let all that talk about a youth ranch go to his head, thinking she’d actually stay around. Or maybe she’d gotten to his little head. Again. Either way, he was a double-damned idiot.
It was possible that she hadn’t recognized that beep on the phone as meaning she had voice mail. He could believe that. Cell phones were different. But not to have called him in all this time, except the once to thank him for the roses? Not to have wondered why he’d just disappeared?
Then to accuse him of getting back together with Lisa? He wasn’t capable of two-timing like that, and it infuriated him to know that she thought he could do such a thing.
Damn! He turned from the fold, kicked at a clod of dirt and stomped toward the house. He should have just stuck with his initial impulse to stay away from her, to get the executor stuff done and then drop out of sight. He shouldn’t have felt concern for her, shouldn’t have worried about how thin and exhausted she looked. None of his business. Her problem, not his. But oh, no, he had to try to help. He had to walk right back into the trap, knowing damn well his attraction to her hadn’t faded one teeny little bit. He needed a shrink. Even a native instinct for self-preservation had failed him.
Holly, Holly, Holly. She’d filled his thoughts and made his blood pound when she wasn’t even around. Some invisible elastic had kept snapping him back to her side.
He’d thought she had changed. Ha! People didn’t change—their faults just became amplified by time, evidently. She couldn’t be trusted. And clearly she didn’t trust him.
The last thing he needed or wanted to see was Holly coming toward him. She rounded the front of the house and walked toward the fold, catching him between her and the lambs. He almost deviated to the corral to grab a horse and get the hell out of here. He didn’t need this. He’d been up all night for too many nights now, and his eyes felt gritty from lack of sleep. Now this?
He passed one of his hired hands. “Keep an eye on the lambs, will you? And if Lisa shows up looking for a horse, tell her to saddle her own.”
The guy’s eyes widened. He wasn’t used to seeing Cliff angry. “Sure, Boss.”
Every damn day he’d had a man pulled away from something more important, namely the sick lambs and herding, to saddle a horse for Lisa. That hadn’t changed, either.
Damn all women to hell.
Well, at least Holly didn’t look as if she were loaded for bear. Instead what he saw was a tired woman approaching him tentatively. Great, now he was an ogre. He stopped, making her come to him. Deal with it, he thought. Just deal with whatever hell she wanted to rain on him and then hit the sack. He could probably sleep for a week.
She halted six feet from him. Much as he wanted to ignore it, he noticed that her eyes looked sunken, her face pale and her mouth unsteady. What now?
“Cliff?”
“My name hasn’t changed,” he said shortly.
She closed her eyes briefly. “Can we talk?”
“About what? There’s nothing left to discuss. You pretty much took care of that last night.”
Her mouth quivered. God, not tears. “I got your messages this morning. I’m sorry.”
“It’s a little late for that.”
“Probably. But I owe you an apology. If I had known the lambs were sick I’d have come over to help somehow. I didn’t know.”
That much he believed. “Okay. Apology accepted.” He took a step to walk around her, but she stopped him.
“Cliff, please. We have to talk.”
About what? He was tired, he was frustrated, he was still angry and when he should have been celebrating the recovery of his lambs, all he wanted to do was kill something. “You really don’t want to talk to me now.”
Her shoulders sagged. Seeing that, something else tried to poke its way through his anger. Concern? No, he wasn’t going to step into that mess again.
“Okay,” she said quietly. Her head dropped and she started to turn away. He should have let her go. Really he should have. His bed had been calling to him for days now, he was in an awful mood and what good was some talk going to do?
But as always happened with her, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t be needlessly cruel, and she had curled in on herself as if he’d just struck her.
“Look,” he said, causing her to still, “I’m exhausted, I’m in a hellacious mood and I can’t guarantee I can follow a conversation. But okay.”
She faced him again, squaring her shoulders as if drawing on every bit of her inner strength. “I messed up. Until last night I hadn’t heard from you since the roses. I couldn’t imagine why. I must have been out when the phone rang, because I never heard it, and I didn’t know about the voice mail. Then when Lisa came back yesterday—she’s hardly been there—I asked if she’d found a job. She told me she’d been spending her time with you.”
Understanding began to dawn through his anger. “She was spending her time riding my horses.” He wouldn’t have believed he still had the energy to sound that sarcastic, but sarcasm dripped like hot tar from every word.
“She omitted that part.”
“Why am I not surprised.” He pulled off his hat, scratched at his head, then clapped it back on. “You believed I would treat you that way?”
She lowered her head, then gave a little nod. “I hadn’t heard from you.” As if that explained everything.
Not quite, but he guessed if she felt insecure... “Ah, hell,” he said finally.
She peeked up at him.
“Quit looking like a whipped dog,” he said. “Damn, I’ve never given you cause to look like this.”
“I gave myself cause. I’m embarrassed. Kinda sick, too.”
He cussed again, quietly this time, letting go of most of his anger. Okay, they needed to talk. “Remember that old oak by the river?”
She flushed as she nodded, telling him she did indeed remember.
“Let’s drive out there.”
“Will the lambs be okay?”
“They seem to be getting better faster. I’ve got enough people to look after them for a few hours. Let’s just go where nobody can find us, because I’m getting damn sick of Lisa turning up any time she feels like it. Although I warn you, once we get there I’ll probably fall asleep.”
There was a wagon track part of the way. Usually they had ridden here, but he didn’t have the energy to spare. Driving was his max, and he was grateful the only obstacles were the bumpy ground. At last he pulled up beside the tree.
It was a restful place, although they had seldom been restful for long here that summer. How many times had he tried to tell himself that whole summer had been some kind of aberration? Well, it hadn’t been, to judge by the way he’d been reacting to her since she came back.
He grabbed the blanket out of the back and spread it in the shade. Then he sat, leaning against the trunk and waited for whatever was next, whether it was sleep, a discussion or an argument.
She didn’t sit immediately, but stood looking up at the tree with her mouth open. “What happened to the tree?”
He twisted and look up at it. The trunk was split now, but amazingly enough both remaining sides still grew. “Lightning. A week or so after you left last time.”
“But it’s still alive.”
“Incredible, isn’t it.” Some things never died, he guessed. Maybe they were too strong. Or too stubborn. His head was swimming with fatigue and he didn’t even attempt to sort through that thought.
At last she sat on the blanket at the far edge from him. “Sleep if you need to,” she
said quietly. “I’ve never seen you so tired.”
“Hang around,” he tried to joke. “Ranching has this effect sometimes.” He wasn’t sure all the words emerged, because the tree seemed as comfortable as a pillow and sleep snatched him between one breath and the next.
* * *
When he awoke, the shadows had grown shorter and Holly had moved closer to stay in the shade. She was braiding some tall grasses into a long rope, and the sight carried him back a decade in time. She had often liked to do that when they lazed around talking.
But it wasn’t ten years ago. It was around noon today, and he still didn’t know what he was doing out here with her except that she had wanted to talk. About what, he had no idea. He thought she’d pretty well covered it all already.
He lay still, watching her, thinking about that long-ago summer, thinking about right now. He still felt her pull. In his groin, yes, but other parts of him still wanted her. He might have been the only one of them in love so long ago, but youth notwithstanding, he had loved her.
Some part of his heart and soul wanted to pick up as if a decade had never passed. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. They’d been little more than kids then, but they were adults now, and evidently they still had a lot of detritus floating around.
“Thanks for letting me sleep,” he said.
She started and twisted toward him. “I’m glad you did. You look better. I needed the time to think, anyway.”
He had slipped down while he slept. Now he pushed himself up until he leaned against the tree once more. “There’s water in the cooler in the back of my truck. It’s probably warm, but you must be thirsty by now.”
She dropped her braiding and jumped up, returning quickly with a bottle of water for each of them. Then she sat cross-legged, facing him. Leaves tossed in a gentle breeze, causing sun and shadow to dance across her face.
