Sweet Laurel Falls

by RaeAnne Thayne

  “I think you should get back to your book club Christmas party for now. I’m really sorry we interrupted it.”

  “Between Ruth and Claire and your grandmother, I’m sure everything will be fine,” Maura assured her.

  Much to his astonished dismay, tears filled Sage’s eyes. “But I know how much you always look forward to the party and the fun you have throwing it for your friends. It’s always the highlight of your Christmas. If anything, you needed it more than ever this year, and now I’ve ruined everything for you.”

  Maura gave him a harsh look, as if this rapid-fire emotional outburst were his fault, then she stepped forward to wrap Sage in her arms.

  “It’s only a party,” she said. “No big deal. They can all carry on just fine without me. And if you want the truth, I almost canceled it this year. I haven’t really been in the mood for Christmas.”

  This information only seemed to make Sage sniffle harder, and he watched helplessly while Maura comforted her. Judging by the mood swings and the emotional outbursts, apparently he had a hell of a lot to learn about having a nineteen-year-old daughter.

  “You’re exhausted, honey. I’m sure you’ve been studying hard for finals.”

  “I haven’t been able to sleep much since the lecture,” she admitted, resting her darker head on her mother’s shoulder. He had a feeling the bond between them would survive the secret Maura had never told her daughter. As he saw the two of them together, something sharp and achy twisted in his gut.

  He had an almost-grown daughter he suddenly felt responsible for, and he had no idea what he was supposed to do about it.

  “Why don’t you take my car home and go back to the house to get some rest,” Maura said. “I’ll catch a ride with your grandmother or with Claire. We can talk more in the morning when we’re both rested and…more calm.”

  “I’ll take her home,” Jack offered quietly.

  “Thank you, but I wouldn’t want to put you to any more trouble. You’ve done enough by bringing her all this way from Boulder. I’m sure you need to get back to…wherever you came from.”

  In a rush to send him on his way, was she? “Actually, I’m planning to stay in town a few days.”

  “Why?” she asked, green eyes wide with surprise. “You hate Hope’s Crossing.”

  “I just found out I have a daughter. I’m not in any particular hurry to walk back out of her life right away.”

  The surprise shifted to something that looked like horror, as if she had never expected him to genuinely want to be part of their daughter’s world on any ongoing basis. Sage, though, lifted her head from her mother’s shoulder and gave him a watery smile. “That’s great. Really great.”

  “What do you say we meet for breakfast in the morning? Unless you have to be here at the bookstore first thing.”

  Maybe a night’s rest would give them all a little breathing space and offer him, at least, a chance to regain equilibrium, before any deeper discussion about the decisions made in the past and where they would go from here.

  “I own the place. I don’t have to punch a clock.”

  “Which usually means you’re here from about eight a.m. to ten p.m.” Sage gave her mother a teasing look.

  “I can meet for breakfast,” Maura said. “Tomorrow I don’t have anything pressing at the store until midmorning.”

  “Perfect. Why don’t we meet at the Center of Hope Café at around eight-thirty? We stopped there to grab a bite at the counter before we walked over here, and I’m happy to say their food is just as good as I remembered.”

  “The café? I don’t know if that’s the greatest idea. You might not want to…” she started to say, but her words trailed off.

  “Want to what?” he asked.

  She seemed to reconsider the subject of any objection on his part. “No. On second thought, sure. Eight-thirty at the café should work just fine.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you then. Shall we go, Sage?”

  “Yeah.” She pressed her cheek to her mother’s. “I’m still furious you didn’t tell me about my father. I probably will be for a while. But I still love you and I will forever and ever.”

  “Back at you,” Maura said, a catch in her voice that she quickly cleared away.

  “Do you think she’ll be okay?” Sage asked him after they walked through the bookstore and the lightly falling snow to the SUV, which he had rented what seemed a lifetime ago at the Denver airport before his lecture.

  “You would know that better than I do.”

  “I thought I knew my mother. We’re best friends. I still can’t believe she would keep this huge secret from me.”

  He wondered at Maura’s reasons for that. Why didn’t she tell Sage? Why didn’t she tell him? Surely in the years since he’d left, she could have found some way to tell him about his child.

  The idea of it was still overwhelming as hell.

  “You’ll have to give me directions to your place,” he said after she fastened her seat belt.

  “Oh. Right. We live on Mountain Laurel Road. Do you remember where that is?”

  “I think so.” If he remembered correctly, it was just past Sweet Laurel Falls, one of his favorite places in town. The falls had been one of their secret rendezvous points. Why he should remember that right now, he had no idea. “I know the general direction, anyway. Be sure to tell me if I start to head off course.”

  Traffic was busier than he expected as he drove through Hope’s Crossing with the wipers beating back the falling snow. He hardly recognized the downtown. When he had lived here, many of these storefronts had been empty or had housed businesses that barely survived on the margin. Now trendy restaurants, bustling bars catering to tourists and boutiques with elegant holiday window displays seemed to jostle for space.

  Some of the historic buildings were still there, but he could see new buildings as well. Much to his surprise, some faction in town had apparently made an effort to keep the town’s historic flavor, even among the new developments. Instead of a modern hodgepodge of architectural styles that would be jarring and unpleasant with the mountain grandeur surrounding the town, it looked as if restrictions had been enacted to require strict adherence to building codes. Even in the few strip-mall-type developments they passed with pizza places, frozen yogurt shops and fast-food places that might appeal to tourists, the buildings had cedar-shake roofs and no flashy signage to jar with the setting.

  As he drove up the hill toward Mountain Laurel Road, the surroundings seemed more familiar, even after twenty years. In his day, this area of town had been called Old Hope, a neighborhood of smaller, wood-framed houses, some of them dating back to the town’s past as a rough and rugged mining town. A few of the houses had been torn down and small condominium units or more modern homes built in their place, and many had obviously been rehabbed.

  He could easily tell which were vacation homes—they invariably had some sort of kitschy decoration on the exterior, like a crossed pair of old wooden skis or snowshoes, or some other kind of cabin-chic decoration. He saw a couple of carved wooden bears and even a wooden moose head on a garage.

  “Turn here,” Sage said. “Our house is the small brick-and-tan house on the right, three houses from the corner.”

  From what he had just seen in town, Maura ran a prosperous business in Hope’s Crossing. According to the information he had gleaned from Sage over the past few days, she had been married for five years to Chris Parker, frontman for Pendragon, a band even Jack had heard of before.

  She must have received a healthy alimony and child support settlement from the guy when their marriage broke up. So why was she living in a small Craftsman bungalow that looked as though it couldn’t be more than nine hundred square feet?

  Despite its small size, the house appeared cozy and warm nestled here in the mountains. Snow drifted down to settle on the wide, deep porch, and a brightly lit Christmas tree blazed from the double windows in front. The lot was roomy, giving her plenty of space for an attached
garage that looked as if it had been added to the main house later.

  He glimpsed movement by the side of the house and spied a couple of cold and hungry mule deer trying to browse off the shrubs, which looked as if they had been wrapped to avoid just such an eventuality. The deer looked up when Jack’s headlights pulled into the driveway, then it turned and bounded away, jumping over a low cedar fence to her neighbor’s property. Its mate followed suit and disappeared in a flash of white hindquarters.

  Now, there was an encounter that brought back memories. When he was a kid and lived up Silver Strike Canyon, he and his mother would often take walks to look for deer. She would even sometimes wake him up if a big buck would wander through their yard.

  “Thanks for the ride. I guess I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “I can walk you in. Help you with your bag and your laundry.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  He hadn’t been given the chance to do anything to help his daughter in nearly twenty years. Carrying in her bags was a small gesture, but at least it was something. He didn’t bother arguing with her; he only climbed out of the SUV and reached into the backseat for the wicker laundry basket she’d loaded up at her apartment in Boulder, hefted it under one arm and picked her suitcase up with the other.

  Sage made a sound of frustration, but followed him up the four steps to the porch and unlocked the house with a set of keys she pulled from her backpack. Warmth washed over them as Sage pushed open the door to let him inside, and the house smelled of cinnamon and clove and evergreen branches from the garlands draped around.

  Jack found himself more interested than he probably should have been in Maura’s house. He took in the built-in bookshelves, the exposed rafters, the extensive woodwork, all softened by colorful textiles and art-glass light fixtures.

  “Looks like Mom went all out with the Christmas decorations. A tree and everything.”

  He glanced at his daughter. His daughter. Would he ever get used to that particular phrase? “You sound surprised.”

  “I thought this year she wouldn’t really be in the mood for Christmas. Usually it’s her favorite time of year but, you know. Everything is different now.”

  He didn’t want to feel this sympathy. For the past three days, he had simmered in his anger that she had kept this cataclysmic thing from him all these years. Being here in Hope’s Crossing, being confronted with the reality of her life and her pain and the difficult choices she must have faced as a seventeen-year-old girl, everything seemed different.

  He felt deflated somehow and didn’t quite know what to do with his anger.

  Sage fingered an ornament on the tree that looked as if it was glued-together Popsicle sticks. The tree was covered in similar handmade ornaments, and he wondered which Sage had made and which had been crafted by her younger sister.

  “I hope Grandma and the aunts helped her and she didn’t have to do it by herself,” Sage fretted. “That would have been so hard for her, taking out all these old ornaments and everything on her own.”

  Sage’s compassion for her mother, despite everything, touched a chord deep inside him. There was a tight bond between the two of them. Had it always been there, or had their shared loss this year only heightened it?

  He spied a cluster of photographs on the wall, dominated by one of Sage and Maura on a mountain trail somewhere, lit by perfect evening light amid the ghostly trunks of an aspen grove. They had their arms around each other, as well as a younger girl with purple highlights in her hair and a triple row of earrings.

  “This must be Layla.”

  Sage moved beside him and reached a hand out to touch the picture. “Yep. She was so pretty, wasn’t she?”

  “Beautiful,” he murmured. All three females were lovely. They looked like a tight unit, and it was obvious even at a quick glance that they had all adored each other.

  Maura had been divorced for a decade and had raised both girls on her own. How had she managed it? he wondered, then reminded himself it was none of his business. He was here only to establish a relationship with his newly discovered daughter, not to walk down memory lane with Maura McKnight, the girl who had once meant everything to him.

  “Oh, look. Presents.” Sage’s eyes were as wide as a little kid’s as she looked at the prettily dressed packages under the tree. What had she been like as a big-eyed preschooler waiting for Santa to arrive? He would never know that. He’d missed all those Christmas Eves of putting out plates of cookies and tucking his little girl into bed.

  “I guess I’d better head out to find a hotel. Are you sure you’re okay now?” He couldn’t see any evidence of the tears from earlier, but a guy never could tell.

  “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m just going to throw in a load of laundry and check my Facebook, then go to bed.”

  “Okay, then. I guess I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Okay. Good night.”

  He turned to head toward the door and had almost reached it when her voice stopped him.

  “Wait!”

  He paused, then was completely disconcerted when she reached up and kissed him on the cheek. “I’m really glad we found each other, Jack.”

  On the way here, they had already had the awkward conversation about what she should call him. She didn’t feel right calling him Dad at this point in their relationship, so he had suggested Jack.

  “I am too,” he said gruffly.

  He meant the words, he thought, as he walked out into the snowy evening lit by stars and the Christmas lights of Maura’s neighbors. Despite everything, the realization that Sage was his daughter astonished and humbled him. And yes, delighted him—even though it meant returning to Hope’s Crossing after all these years and facing the past he thought he had left far behind.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FOR A LONG TIME AFTER SAGE walked out with Jack, Maura sat in her chair with her hands folded together on her desk, staring into space.

  Jackson Lange was here in Hope’s Crossing.

  She’d never thought she would have occasion to use those particular words together in the same sentence. Stupid and shortsighted of her, she supposed. This was his hometown, and despite his avowed hatred of the place, she should have expected that someday he would eventually be drawn back.

  One would assume some latent affection for the town where he had lived his first eighteen years must have seeped into his bones. It was only natural. Salmon spent their last breaths returning to their birthplace. Why should she simply have assumed Jackson wouldn’t want to come back at least once in twenty years?

  In her own defense, she had always assumed his hatred for his father would also serve to keep him away.

  In the early years after Sage was born, she used to come up with all these crazy, complicated scenarios in her head for what might happen if he did return. She had worked it all out—what she would say to him, how he would respond, the immense self-satisfaction she fully expected to find from throwing back in his face that he had left her yet she had managed to move on and survive.

  In her perfect imagination, he would come back on the proverbial hands and knees, telling her what a fool he had been, begging her to forgive him, promising he would never be parted from her again.

  Around the time she’d met Christian, she had been more than ready to put those fantasies away as both impossible and undesirable. She had put all her resources into thrusting Jack firmly into her past, and focusing instead on her new relationship and the love she told herself she felt for Chris.

  She could never completely assign him to the past, of course, not when her beautiful, smart, clever child bore half his DNA. Sage was always a reminder of Jack. She would turn her head a certain angle, and Maura would remember Jack looking at her the same way. Sage would come up with a particularly persuasive argument for something, twist logic and sense in a way that never would have occurred to Maura, and she would remember how brilliantly Jack could do the same.

  In all those early fantasies a
nd all the years to come later, it had never once occurred to her that someday Sage might find him on her own and bring him back to the town he couldn’t wait to leave.

  Her sigh sounded pathetic in her small office, and she shook her head. Nothing she could do about this now. Against all odds, he and Sage had found each other, and now she would have to deal with the consequences of him in their lives. A smart woman would find a way to make the best of it—but right now she didn’t, for the life of her, know how she was supposed to do that.

  “Having a rough night?”

  She turned at the voice and found her mother in the doorway, still lovely at sixty with her ageless skin and Maura’s own auburn hair, the color now carefully maintained at To Dye For. Emotions crowded her chest at the sight of the sympathy in her mother’s green eyes behind her little glasses, and she suddenly wanted to rest her head on Mary Ella’s shoulder, as Sage had done with her earlier, and weep and weep.

  Her mother and her sisters were her best friends, and she didn’t think she would have survived the past eight months without them. Or what she would have done twenty years ago, when she was seventeen and terrified and pregnant in a small town that could still be closed-minded and mean about those sorts of things.

  She fought back the tears and mustered a smile. “Rough night? Yeah. You could say that.”

  “Oh, honey. Why did you keep this to yourself all these years?”

  “I didn’t think it mattered. He was gone and insisted he wasn’t ever coming back. Why did I need to flit around town badmouthing him for knocking me up and then taking off?”

  Mary Ella stepped forward and pulled her into a hug, and those blasted tears threatened again. “I have to admit, I suspected. I knew you had become friendly with him. People told me about seeing you together. I also suspected you had a little crush on him. I just hadn’t realized things had…progressed. I don’t know how I missed it now. Sage looks a little like him, doesn’t she?”

  “Do you think so?”