“That’s not exactly the way it happened,” Lacey said from behind him.
Jerrod jumped off the side of the bed and turned to face her. “Okay, so I paraphrased a little. I don’t remember his specific words.”
“He said all of this right in front of you?” Lacey asked. “Why would he do that?”
“Alex made him,” Jerrod said proudly. “He says we’re a team and we stick together. But now he wants us to let Granddad on the team too. That’s gonna suck.”
“I’m just glad everybody knows.” Jenna sighed. “It’s hard keeping a secret like that.”
Jerrod turned to his mother. “You told her?” the question sounded more like an accusation.
“No, she figured it out on her own,” Lacey replied.
“Well, aren’t you a friggin’ genius.” He jumped back to sit on the side on the bed. “So, what’s it like to be on drugs?”
“My head hurt like crazy, but I didn’t care. I was like, super happy,” Jenna answered. “Then bam! I was down for the count.”
“Yeah, you probably slept the whole time I was doing your chores. You’re going to owe me big time.”
“No way,” Jenna laughed. “This is payback for the week after you fell through the porch.”
Lacey loved the lighthearted banter between her children, but too much excitement would cause Jenna’s head to hurt again. She remembered the concussion she’d had when they were born. “That’s enough, you two.” She pulled Jerrod off the bed and toward the door.
Jenna’s cell phone rang. “Oh, it’s Alex!”
“Don’t talk too long,” Lacey warned. “You need your rest.”
Lacey had just finished the supper dishes and stepped outside to sit on the porch steps when Ben’s truck lights bobbed down the driveway. She first thought it might be Alex. He hadn’t answered his phone since he left the hospital, but he’d called both of the kids. She supposed he wasn’t ready to talk about what he’d learned at the hospital.
She wasn’t looking forward to the conversation either, but now that the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, she was ready to get it over with. She’d hidden the truth long enough.
Ben parked his truck beside the barn. He waved as he went inside to help Darrel finish the evening chores. They’d decided to let Darrel work from sunup to sundown every Tuesday and Thursday, and then straight through the weekend. Ben worked for the auto garage in town during the week, and now, would also spend weekends at the farm. They were both strong and smart, but she suspected that Ben picked up a lot of Darrel’s slack.
At first, she didn’t know how she’d keep them busy. She insisted Jerrod and Jenna still do their part. But the Taylor boys didn’t need a lot of instruction, and before she knew it, repairs were being planned all over the farm. Even the house was likely to get a few improvements soon.
Ben seemed to be the planner. He was extremely detail oriented. It was hard to believe he was only nineteen, but she’d had a lot of responsibilities at that age too.
It was a shame that all their earnings were going into savings for Darrel’s college tuition, while Ben worked on cars to make ends meet for them and their grandmother. He was an intelligent boy and, given the chance, he could do better.
Both of them were quickly weaving themselves into the family. Even Buck, her suspicious male herd dog, was warming up to Ben. The boys were getting so familiar with her family; Lacey decided she should have a talk with them.
When she entered the barn, Ben was doling out flakes of hay while Darrel filled water containers. They smiled her way and continued working.
“We wrapped Buttercup’s legs to be safe and she looks as right as rain now,” Ben said. “How’s Jenna feeling?”
“She’s doing fine. I appreciate your staying with Jerrod while she was in the hospital. But I wanted to talk to both of you before you leave.”
The Taylor boys exchanged wary glances. “Is there a problem, Ms. Carlyle?” Darrel asked. “If we’ve missed any chores or done anything wrong, we’d we glad to fix it.”
“Your work has been fine, better than fine. It’s just that the two of you are becoming part of this place, and, well...Indian Lakes is a small town. People tend to entertain themselves with gossip.”
A look of misery crossed the boys’faces as they exchanged another glance. Darrel wound the water hose and upended the empty bucket to dry. Ben hung the pitchfork on the wall with the other barn tools.
“I didn’t expect word to travel this far,” Ben said.
“We’re not anything like our parents, Ms. Carlyle,” Darrel followed.
“I guess you’ll want us to leave,” Ben added.
“Leave! No!” Lacey was completely bewildered by the boys’ words. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t even know you had parents.”
Ben took in a deep breath of relief.
“Of course we’ve got parents.” Darrel rolled his eyes. “Everybody has parents.”
“I lost mine when I was your age, Darrel,” Lacey informed him. “I lived with my grandfather after they died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Ms. Carlyle,” Ben said. “It’s only right, since we’re working for you, that we tell you the truth. Our parents are…incarcerated.”
Lacey gasped. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not,” Darrel blurted. “They deserve to be where they are.”
Ben lightly shoved his brother. “Cut it out, Darrel. Let Ms. Carlyle say what she came here to say.”
“Well, I think you just demonstrated what I wanted to talk to you about,” Lacey said. “All families have certain things they’d rather keep private.”
Darrel looked a little confused, but Ben clarified for his benefit. “What I think you’re saying, Ms. Carlyle, is what happens on the Double J, stays on the Double J. You don’t want us spreading your business around town.”
“I wasn’t planning to put it quite that way,” Lacey smiled, “but I think you’ve got the idea.”
“We know a thing or two about the gossip mill, Ms. Carlyle,” Darrel chuckled. “Our granny calls it the devil’s party line.”
“If anybody has any questions about what goes on here, ma’am, we’ll refer them directly to you,” Ben added.
After saying goodnight, Lacey left the barn. She stopped outside the door to turn off the water spigot.
“She didn’t even ask about, you know,” Darrel said behind the closed door. “Most everybody wants to know why they were put away.”
“That’s because she’s not the nosey sort,” Ben replied. “She’s a lady.”
Lacey grinned all the way back to the house. Ben had a few things to learn about women. Even if they are ladies, they can be curious.
The difference is, knowing how, when, and where to get the information you want.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Alex had been rolling the new reality of his fatherhood around in his head until his brain felt bruised. The last thing he needed to see this morning was Lacey’s truck pulling into his parking lot. He wasn’t ready to talk to her about this, and he didn’t feel bad about that. She’d certainly kept the secret from him long enough. Technically, she still hadn’t intended for him to know the truth.
In seconds, Donna greeted her in the front office. There was no door to his workspace, and he didn’t want Donna to hear their conversation. He walked to the open archway between the two rooms. “Donna, would you mind going out for those office supplies we need?”
“I already ordered them online, boss,” she answered proudly. “They’ll be here on Monday.”
“Well, perhaps you could pick up the supplies we need for the kitchen.”
“I got them this morning on my way here.” She still smiled.
“How about picking up my dry cleaning then?”
“Not in my job description.” Her smile was fading. “I’m your receptionist, not your mother.”
“Donna,” Alex growled. “Go out somewhere and take a break, dammit.”
> She jerked open the bottom drawer to her desk and pulled out her purse. “I’ll just go over to the diner and have an iced coffee,” she huffed. “And I’m not going to bring you one.”
After the front door was firmly closed, Alex walked back to his desk and sat. “Damn, iced coffee would be good,” he mumbled.
Lacey approached his desk with determined steps. “I need to talk to you, Alex.”
“I hope you’re here to talk about business. I’m busy. I don’t have time to play games.” Alex opened a file on his desk and reached for a pencil.
“I wouldn’t think of wasting your precious time.” Her cheeks were suddenly hot pink. “As a matter of fact, I would have simply called, but you seem to have misplaced your phone.”
Alex glanced at the cell phone lying on the upper right corner of his desk. He didn’t owe her any explanations.
“I want to talk to you about the boys.”
“What boys? Do you have more children hidden somewhere?”
“Don’t be an idiot, Alex. I’m talking about Darrel and Ben Taylor. The boys you hired to work on the farm.”
“What about them?”
“That’s what I want to know. Did you have them checked out before you hired them? Do you know anything about them?”
“They’re helping out on a farm. It’s not brain surgery or rocket science. They don’t have access to your bank accounts or credit cards.” The file in front of Alex was for a resort on Myrtle Beach. It would be nice to be there right now, anywhere but here.
“They do have access to my children,” Lacey replied. “My home life and business are one and the same, you know. Jerrod and Jenna’s safety comes before anything else. I don’t let just anyone off the street move into their lives.”
Alex sat back hard against his chair and glared at Lacey. He could almost smell the can of worms that had just been opened. “Oh, you don’t have to tell me,” he snarled. “You don’t even let their own father into their lives.”
“That’s not fair.” Lacey seemed to shrink back a little, or was that just his wishful thinking?
“It’s been weeks. In all that time you could have found a few minutes to say, ‘Guess what, Alex, these are your kids.’ You’re seriously going to tell me what’s not fair? What about the fact that I never got to hold my babies, see them take their first steps, hear their first words, tuck them into bed at night, walk the floor when they were sick?”
“You weren’t there. I wanted you to be there. I prayed you’d come back. Do you think it was fun, being eighteen-years-old and carrying all that responsibility on my own?”
“You didn’t have to do it alone,” Alex shouted. “You could have found some way to contact me.”
“How, Alex-through your family, your friends, all the people who protected you from getting trapped by the town slut?”
“Don’t say that.” His voice lowered. “I never thought that about you.”
Lacey dropped into a chair at the front of his desk. She looked like she’d been deflated. “Let me ask you something.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “If you had stayed that summer, eighteen-years-old, no job, nothing but a high school diploma, no career in sight, would we still be together? Do you think we would have made it, with two babies to feed and care for? Do you seriously think you’d have been prepared for that kind of stress?”
“I don’t know.” Alex thought back to that time in his life. “I know you had a hard time. Your grandfather told me what happened. I’m sorry for the pain it caused you. I’m sorry for the damage it left behind. I know it must have been hard. I was going through a hard time too. I spent a year in the hospital. The treatments were horrendous. I had one surgery after another, most of them failed. I wasn’t at a party either, but I survived too.”
“We were too young.” Lacey rose from the chair. “We wouldn’t have lasted.” She started to walk away, and then stopped at the archway, then turned back to him. “It won’t work now, either. Do you want to know why?”
“Why?” If she gave him the needing more crap again, he’d blow his top.
“Because, all this time I never knew where you were. I didn’t know what had happened to you. But you always knew where I was, and you never came back.”
Alex was at a loss for words. It didn’t feel like a single breath left his body before he heard her truck’s engine fade away in the distance.
****
A week passed with the only communication occurring between Alex and the kids. He called each of them at least once a day. Jenna had recovered and was back to most of her everyday chores.
As she and Jerrod knelt on each side of a row of tomato plants, they filled baskets with the fruit ready to sell. They liked to work at a similar pace, to keep each other company during the hours the garden required. This morning, neither of them had been very talkative.
Finally, Jenna broke the silence. “It isn’t like I thought it would be.”
“Why do you always start a conversation in the middle?” Jerrod groused. “I don’t know if you’re talking about tomatoes, the global economy, or life in general.”
“I’m talking about finding our father, you dork.” Jenna’s gloves were grimy. She pushed her wide brimmed hat back with her forearm. “I thought when he and Mom met again, it would be wildly romantic.”
“Geez, Jenna, they’re old people. It was bad enough to catch them kissing on the front porch.” Jerrod cringed. “People their ages are pretty well played out, I think. They’re not interested in romantic stuff. They’re just looking for companionship.”
“Where’d you get an idea like that?” Jenna asked.
“I saw it on the front cover of that old people magazine that Granddad gets.” Jerrod stood and stretched his back. His basket was full. “The article was titled, How to Find a Companion in your Golden Years. There was a picture of an old man and woman fishing off a pier.”
“Mom does like to fish,” Jenna mumbled. “I wonder what else old people do together?”
“They go out to dinner and movies a lot, because they get good discounts.” Jerrod took a long step between the plants to help Jenna finish filling her basket. “And, according to the TV commercials, they hold hands when they walk around. Then, when they get home, they sit around drinking coffee and talking about insurance.”
“I don’t know if Mom and Alex are that old.”
“They are,” Jerrod assured her. “Have you seen that jar of face cream in the bathroom? Mom’s always rubbing on some kind of goop. That’s to keep her from getting all wrinkled up. Once she and Alex get back together, she’ll probably stop doing it and get all pruny looking, like Granddad.”
“Do you think they will?” Jenna stood and stretched now, in preparation for carrying her basket to the end of the row. “Do you think they’ll get back together?”
“I don’t know. They don’t seem to get along very well. Maybe we should come up with a plan to help them out.”
“I bet if anything happened to Mom, Alex would come running like a scalded ape.”
“Yeah, he sure went nuts when you got hurt.” Jerrod thought for a moment. “If something like that did happen, they’d see how much they care about each other.”
“So what do you think we should do?” Jenna sighed.
“We need to make a plan.” Jerrod took on a devious expression.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Alex stood at the sink in his boxer shorts. The sky was a purplish shade of gray through his kitchen window. Not a single star could be seen through thick evening clouds. A lightning bolt flashed in the far distance.
He took a bite of his bologna sandwich and thought about Lacey’s pot roast, meatloaf, fried chicken, and catfish. He tossed the rest of the sandwich into the garbage bin. It tasted like cardboard compared to the memories he’d collected in Lacey’s kitchen.
After her visit the week before, he’d thought about nothing but her. She was probably right about them being too young for a lasting relationship, th
irteen years ago. But he couldn’t believe she had so little faith in them now.
She didn’t understand how hurt he’d been by her rejection. Returning to Indian Lakes had been impossible. The thought that she’d chosen another man had haunted him. He’d gone as far as cutting ties with his childhood friends in order to avoid hearing about her.
Now, look what that had gotten him. He’d never learned that she’d stayed alone. He hadn’t heard that she’d had children. He didn’t know that she’d struggled daily to build a home and business of her own.
Why had he never come back? Pride? What had caused it all? Interference and misunderstandings. The same things that had caused her to not receive his letters.
That was all in the past. What kept them apart now? Stubbornness, plain and simple.
There was no doubt that he wanted Lacey in his bed on a full-time basis, but that wasn’t the only thing he wanted from her. Just as often, he thought about the kids. He pictured them together as a family. He’d been thinking about that even before he’d known they were his. Now, he was obsessed with the idea. Were the twins the big draw? Was there enough love between Lacey and him to make it work in the long run? Neither of them had spoken the L word to the other. Not in the entire time he’d been back. It was too frightening to be that vulnerable again.
The only person he could talk to, to try to sort this out, was Lacey. But she’d already made up her mind she was finished with him. With all the wealth he’d accumulated, he could give her all she needed. Hell, she wouldn’t even tell him what it was that she needed. What was he supposed to do, hire a mind reader?
His cell phone on the kitchen table rang. Alex ducked his head to drink from the water tap, a nasty habit he had when he was alone.
The caller ID showed Jenna’s name on the display. He picked it up immediately, anxious to hear a friendly voice.
“Hey sugar, how’s it going?”
“Not good, Alex,” Jenna voice shook. “I think Mom is hurt.”
“Hurt?” An instant chill of alarm ran up his spine. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“I don’t know? We found her lying on the floor in the barn. Jerrod is out there with her now. I had to come inside to get my phone from the charger. I don’t know what to do. We can’t carry her inside.”
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