by Lori Wilde
Ryder shifted uncomfortably on his seat. “Listen Clara, I was just about to drive up to my dad’s house, so . . .”
“Oh my, your first big meeting in thirteen years. Are you nervous?”
Yes, but he wasn’t going to admit it. “No.”
“Well, you should be. This is big. I’m nervous for you. I’ve been sitting here knitting like a fiend. You know how I knit when I’m nervous.”
“You can stop knitting. No need for drama.”
Clara snorted as if he was as dumb as a box of rocks. “Tend your garden, Ryder.”
He wasn’t even going to ask what that meant.
“Gotta go now, honey,” she said kindly. “My granddaughter is taking me Christmas shopping.”
“Wait,” he said, not wanting her to hang up. If she hung up, he had nothing to do but walk up to that door and knock on it. Clara was his touchstone and as long as they were talking, he had a connection to his ordinary world.
But Clara had already hung up.
Gulping, Ryder disconnected the call and shifted his attention back to the farmhouse where he’d grown up, but which felt so alien.
Time to man up.
Heaving in a deep breath, Ryder sped down the dirt road to the house and crossed the threshold into his past.
The condition of the outside of the house hit him hard. The front porch sagged and the house needed repainting. The blinds in the front windows were smashed and mangled from objects inside being shoved against them. The welcome mat was worn bare and filled with dirt. The glass in the lamp was shattered, and a busted lawn chair lay turned upside down against the railing.
Sad.
Knocking on that door was harder than Ryder thought it was going to be. He hadn’t seen or spoken to his father in thirteen years. How would this go down? His arm was a fifty-pound weight, and he rapped like he was a knuckle-dragging ape.
But when the door opened, his jaw unhinged, because the eyes he stared into weren’t his father’s, but the last person he expected to see at the Circle S.
Katie answered the door because she was expecting Jana. Seeing Ryder standing there took her last breath.
He wasn’t six inches away from her, but it felt as if there was an invisible glass wall between them. He was dressed in cowboy gear, looking a long way from the badass biker she’d slept with in LA the previous December. The Western-style shirt, complete with mother-of-pearl snaps instead of buttons, fit him like it had been tailor-made for his rugged, masculine form.
A black Stetson—but of course, what other color would the town bad boy wear?—was cocked back on his head, revealing a headful of tousled dark hair. He’d grown it out from the conservative haircut he’d worn the last time she’d seen him.
Katie approved, even if the cut did make him look less like badass military man and more like the hot young teen he’d once been.
Except now he was a lot more dangerous. The hard look in his eyes, the stern set to his jaw. He was not happy to be here, and from his tight body language, even more unhappy to find her in his father’s house.
Hey, not any more unhappy than she was to be here.
She’d been dreading this moment since she learned Ryder was going to be Joe’s best man. She’d had a year’s notice. She should have been more prepared for the impact of seeing him again.
She was not.
He said nothing.
Neither did she.
Katie gulped.
Ryder didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t even blink.
“You look incredible,” he said so softly she wasn’t sure she heard him.
Her cheeks warmed at his compliment, and her heart beat faster. Watch it. She tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. She was in work clothes. Jeans, long-sleeved T-shirt, apron, and sneakers. Nothing sexy about that, and yet he was looking at her like she was filet mignon.
“Do you want to come in?” she invited as if it were her house instead of his.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
Unable to peel her gaze from the bad-boy, biker cowboy on the front porch, she moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Working.”
“What kind of work?” He scowled.
“Organizing things.” She raised a hand to hold on to the door, needing something, anything to give her support beneath the onslaught of his enigmatic green-eyed stare.
Quizzical eyebrows shot up on his forehead.
“It’s my job,” she answered his unspoken question. “I have a business helping people get organized. I started it after my grandfather had to move to a retirement community following his car accident, and Joe bought Gramps’s Christmas tree farm, and we had to go through his things, and it turned out I sort of have a gift for it and . . .”
Oh gosh, she was saying too much. Babbling. Shut up. Just shut up.
Katie clamped her mouth closed.
“Where’s my father?” he asked, suddenly in motion, muscling across the threshold, shattering the invisible glass wall with his broad chest, coming straight at Katie, nothing between them but air.
She leaped aside, getting out of the way before he touched her. “He’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“At the hospital.”
Ryder pulled up short. “What’s going on?”
“He had an episode with his blood sugar.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your father’s a diabetic.” She put a palm to her mouth. “You didn’t know?”
“I haven’t talked to him in thirteen years, Katie, what do you think?”
Katie nodded, wished she wasn’t in the middle of his family situation. “After Twyla died, Jax didn’t take care of himself. Stopped taking his medication. If a neighbor hadn’t come by to check on him—” She broke off. It wasn’t really her place to fill him in on the details of his father’s condition.
Plus, she was breathless to see him again. She’d forgotten how big and powerful he was.
“Who?” he asked. “What?”
“Hondo Crouch’s wife, Patsy, found him passed out in his easy chair. He almost died.”
Sharp silence descended between them.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Ryder cursed under his breath, and for a flicker of a second, Katie saw a flash of hurt in his eyes, but he quickly squelched it. No room for weakness in Ryder Southerland.
Katie wasn’t sure what to do. Or say, for that matter. So she just stood there, waiting for him to make the next move.
“Not your fault.” He grunted. “Or your problem.”
“Kinda is. It’s my job.”
“Dad?” Ryder called, trucking into the living room, as if looking for his father, unconvinced she was telling him the truth.
“He’s not here.” This would be the perfect time for her to exit, but her purse was in the kitchen and her car keys were in her purse. No running away this time. Reluctantly, she trailed after Ryder.
His shoulders were so broad he was having trouble squeezing down the path made narrow through the towers of piled junk. He moved like a bulldozer, plowing over stuff, shoving boxes aside, sending them crashing and spilling.
Katie cringed, and her pulse ticked fast and heavy. “Wh-where are you going?”
Ryder whirled around to glare at her, his face a mask of anger. She shrank back, bumped into a top-heavy stack of boxes, and sent them toppling.
He grabbed her hand, pulled her toward him, out of the way of the crashing boxes. Held her close, his arms encircling her waist. “You’re trembling. Was it the falling boxes or did I scare you?”
“Both,” she admitted. “You look so mad.”
“Not at you, Katie.” His voice turned pillow soft. “Never you.”
“Oh,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to say. “Oh.”
He stared into her eyes, gently this time. “I forget,” he said, “how scary I can look.”
“It must be a shock,” she said. “Coming home to find your father in th
e hospital and . . .” She waved an arm. “This.”
“Yeah. It was a disaster when I lived here,” he said. “But it’s worse now. Much worse.”
“You stepmother had . . .” She wanted to put this delicately. “. . . issues.”
“That’s a kind way of putting it. And that’s why Dad hired you. To sort all this out?”
“Actually, home health hired me. If I’m not able to get the place cleaned up before he’s discharged on Monday, he’ll have to go to the rehab hospital. Home health won’t come into a place this—”
“Filthy,” Ryder finished for her, so she didn’t have to.
She smiled at him kindly, knowing this was a stab in his heart. From everything she’d heard about Ryder’s mother, she’d been a sweet, loving woman who’d kept a meticulous house. “It must hurt learning your father was living in such terrible conditions.”
“His choice.” Ryder swallowed visibly, his arm still around her waist.
She felt overwhelmed, and anxious to create some distance between them as memories of last Christmas floated through her head, but there was nowhere to go.
If she stepped backward she would slide into a Rascal scooter stacked high with old newspapers. If she stepped to the right, she’d fall into a well-worn La-Z-Boy recliner with blankets piled on it. If she stepped to the left, well, there was no left to step toward. On that side of the room the boxes reached the ceiling. The other rooms in the house were in the same condition, if not worse. This was the most challenging mess she’d ever undertaken to sort out and organize. She had dropped by to get the lay of the land after agreeing to take on the project. Tomorrow her crew would arrive and they would roll up their sleeves and get down to serious work.
“Why didn’t you call and tell me Twyla had died?” Ryder whispered, his palm pressed into her spine. “Why did I have to find out from the online newspaper?”
“I . . .” She cleared her throat. “I didn’t feel it was my place to interfere.”
“Or you didn’t want to talk to me.”
Well, that too.
“I thought we were friends.”
Friends.
Were they friends? It certainly didn’t feel like it. There was too much chemistry between them. Too much yearning for this feeling to be anything close to friendship. She wanted him. Just as much as she had wanted him a year ago. Maybe even more.
His eyes were sharp, and full of pain.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That I didn’t tell you. That I didn’t call you back when you left that message on my voice mail—”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” he said. “Not your circus. Not your monkeys, right? You set the rules. I should have honored them.” He let her go, stepped back, but then wobbled as he stepped on something and lost his balance.
She put out a hand to stabilize him, but he flicked his wrist, deflected her touch, and she couldn’t help feeling slightly rejected.
“I’m here now,” he said. “I can deal with this.” He arced his arm wide, indicating the chaos around them.
“You’ll need help.”
“Just show me how to get started and I can take it from there.”
Katie started to argue. Even with her accomplished team and a cleaning crew, she knew getting the place livable before Monday was a feat. Ryder going at it by himself didn’t stand a ghost of a chance.
But she nodded and said yes. Some things people had to figure things for themselves.
Chapter 8
“Let’s get to it.” Ryder rubbed his palms together.
“Now?”
“No time like the present.”
“Don’t you want to go see your father first?”
Ryder winced. “I’d rather get started on this.”
“When are you going to see him?”
“Later.”
“Sooner is better.”
“Later.” He growled.
“Have you seen Joe?”
“Later.” He grunted.
“Oh, it’s like that, is it?”
“Yeah.” Cleaning the house was the perfect way to sweep his feelings under the rug. Bonus, he was here with Katie.
“So tackling this mountain of mess is easier than tackling the emotional messes.”
“You got it,” he said. She’d nailed him. The woman could see straight through his bullshit. He unbuttoned his sleeves and rolled them up. “Where do we start?”
She looked at him like she wanted to prod and poke. He leveled her a let’s-get-down-to-business stare and her expression shifted, mouth tightening, eyes softening, as if she felt sorry for him, so she wasn’t going to say what she really wanted to say.
Damn. He hated when people felt sorry for him.
“I’ve made some progress in your father’s bedroom.” She inclined her head toward the back of the house. “Although progress in this house is a relative term. Translation? It means I can actually open the bedroom door without knocking over a dozen things in a convoluted Rube Goldberg chain reaction.”
He laughed. She was funny. Plus laughing was better than the alternative: yelling in anger. Not at her, but at his father, at Twyla. At the hurt kid he’d once been who lashed out at anyone, and everyone who tried to help him. And at the absent son he’d become.
She smiled and canted her head in a way that made him think of sunshine glinting off diamonds, and crooked her finger at him.
“How long have you been doing this for a living?” Ryder asked, following her as she inched her way through the thin trail leading from the living room and down the hall to the master bedroom. Stuff was stacked to the ceiling—old newspapers and magazines, paper bags, plastic milk jugs, clothing, cardboard boxes. Funky smells assaulted them at every step. It stunk of musk and dust and yuck.
Damn, Dad, how the hell did you live in this?
“Ten months.”
“Is this your worst case?”
“My most challenging,” she said, reframing it in a more positive light. He liked that. “Yes.”
Ryder grunted when the tip of his boot connected with an orange so rotten it was greenish-white, and it disintegrated into oozy mush.
“What?” she asked, turning.
“Hit a challenge.”
“Here.” Katie plucked a pair of vinyl gloves from the pocket of the green and white checkered apron she had tied around her waist, tossed them to him along with a Ziploc freezer bag. She was prepared. This was nothing new.
“I’m thinking a Hazmat suit is in order.” He put on the gloves and bent to peel the fuzz blob formerly known as an orange off the toe of his boot, and dropped it into the Ziploc bag along with the gloves. “Now what?”
“I’ve got a large plastic trash bag in the bedroom. You can discard it there.”
“God, Dad,” he muttered under his breath. “How did it come to this?”
“Living with a hoarder is an uphill battle. It’s easier to turn a blind eye,” she said, her voice rich with sympathy and understanding.
“Blind, deaf, and mute too.” Ryder wished he could have a big scoop of that sympathy for his father and his stepmother. Right now, all he felt was pity and disgust. “Or he’s actually going blind.”
“Could be,” she said. “Who knows? Uncontrolled diabetes can lead to blindness. But I don’t know the specifics of your father’s condition.”
“Shit.” He shoved a hand through his hair, looked at the unmitigated ruin all around them, felt bleak. Yeah, he could see how his father might choose to ignore the mess once it got this bad. Helpless in the face of so much work. How did Katie do it?
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I should have come back sooner.”
“What would you have done?” Katie asked. “You can’t rescue people who don’t want to be rescued.”
“Maybe he did want to be rescued.” Ryder chuffed out his breath. “I mean, c’mon, who wants to live like this?”
“I’m sure Twyla didn’t even want to live like this. From what my c
ounselor has told me, hoarding is a mental illness. A form of OCD.” Katie eased past a treadmill still in the box parked in the hallway.
“You’re seeing a counselor?” That pulled him up short. Katie seemed so well-adjusted. She had such a supportive family. Why would she need a counselor? He stopped, so did she, and she squeezed around to look at him.
“For a time,” she said. “To help me put my life back together after Matt died.”
His gut kicked at the thought of how rough things must have been for her after her fiancé died. And damn if for a split second there, he felt jealous of a dead man.
“Did you ever see a counselor?” she asked.
“I had a few mandatory sessions when I was in the army.”
“And?”
“It helped.”
“But you didn’t keep it up?”
“My PTSD was mild.”
Her eyes cradled his gaze. “I’m sorry you suffered.”
“Everybody suffers, look around.”
Katie pushed open the door to his father’s bedroom and stepped in as far as the small area she’d cleared would allow. Ryder moved in behind her. If he leaned forward an inch, he would be touching her. God, how he wanted to touch her, find comfort in her soft warmth.
“Progress, huh?”
“Warned you. I’ve made piles. Keep, donate, and throw away.” She indicated each heap with a flap of her hand.
“How long did it take you to get this far?”
“Three hours,” she admitted. “But my crew is on another job. They will be here tomorrow, and things will go much more quickly.”
“Until then looks like it’s just you and me,” he said.
She forced a smile, but it was a ghost, thin and faded, as she echoed, “Just you and me” in a voice that said the idea scared her.
Hell, he was scared too. “Tell me what to do.”
Katie shifted her weight. She looked uncertain, as if unsure how to proceed with him here.
He tightened his jaw. He was determined to be part of the process, even though he wasn’t sure why he gave a damn. “I’m not leaving.”
