“A lot of things about me you don’t know,” she replied, even as she felt herself closing off from him. From the world in general. It was safer that way. “I don’t feel like talking tonight,” she told him.
Then, before he could ask anything else, she began making love to him not just as if this was the last time, but as if all of life was over after this one final time—because to her, it was—and it killed her to know that it probably didn’t mean the same to him.
* * *
MIKE MADE HIMSELF scarce the next day, deliberately keeping away from Sam because he knew she was packing up and preparing to leave the ranch. She’d made it clear to him last night that today was her last day.
He wanted no part of it.
He’d walked out of the house before she had a chance to tell anyone else that she was leaving.
* * *
MIGUEL RECEIVED THE news of her pending departure with sorrow and made no effort to hide it from her.
“You have become part of our family in a very short time, Samantha,” he told her when she broke the news. “I want you to remember that there will always be a place for you here at my table and in my house.” Ordinarily, he tried not to interfere in other people’s lives. But there was a great deal at stake here. “Are you sure that you must go?”
Sam nodded, willing her voice not to crack. Forbidding herself to cry. “My publisher said they wanted me working on this project as soon as possible.”
“And you have to go where this project is?” Miguel questioned. “You cannot work on it from, say, right here?” he asked hopefully.
“It’s better if I’m right there with the person whose autobiography I’m doing,” she told him with a halfhearted smile.
“Better,” he repeated, “but not all that necessary, yes? You could, perhaps, take many notes, then go somewhere else to write them, like perhaps, here again?” he asked.
The look in the older man’s eyes slashed at her heart. Why couldn’t Mike look at her that way? Why couldn’t he protest a little? She didn’t want him to lie down in front of her like a roadblock, but he could have at least said something about not being happy about her leaving.
“You’re not making this easy for me, Miguel.” She laughed.
“Good, because seeing you leave will not be easy for me,” he told her. “I have come to think of you as a daughter,” he continued seriously, “and, if I am not mistaken, you have come to think of all of us as a family perhaps?”
The way he said it, it sounded like half a question, half an assertion.
There were tears in Sam’s eyes as she separated herself from the man. She still had to pack. “Please, Miguel, I have to go.”
Miguel nodded. “I understand,” he said sadly. “I will leave you to your packing.” With that, he turned from her in the dining room and walked away, moving as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders, threatening to bend him in two.
* * *
MIGUEL WAS QUICK to inform the others what was going on. And to mention the fact that Mike seemed to have pulled a vanishing act.
The others fanned out to find him.
Eli turned out to be the lucky one. Or not so lucky as the case might be.
“What did that wood ever do to you?” Eli asked, coming up behind his older brother on the other side of the barn.
In an effort to work out the frustration he was feeling over what was happening, Mike had decided to take out his aggression on the firewood.
“Nothing. I decided we needed to stock up on firewood,” he said in between swings that seemed to vibrate all through him.
“It looks like you’ve got enough there to last through the blizzard of 2020, provided it actually decides to snow here,” Eli commented, looking at the piles of firewood Mike had already chopped.
“Is there a point to this nonconversation?” Mike asked, annoyed that he couldn’t be left alone. “Because if there isn’t, I’d like to get back to what I’m doing.”
Eli eyed him knowingly. “You mean wallowing in denial?”
Mike swung the ax again, making contact with a new cord of wood.
“Go away, Eli,” he growled.
Rather than leave, Eli leaned against the side of the barn, crossing his arms before him and looking for all the world as if he intended to remain where he was.
“Not until you talk to me and tell me what’s really wrong.”
Mike slanted an exasperated look in his direction. “You mean other than having a nosy brother who won’t back off?”
“Yeah, other than that.”
Swallowing a curse, Mike set the ax to the side for a moment and glared at Eli. He might as well tell him. Of all his siblings, Eli was the one who could be trusted to keep things to himself.
“Okay, you asked for it.” The words came tumbling out, confused and out of order, but maybe it was enough to satisfy his brother.
This wasn’t easy, but he forced himself to talk about it. “You know how sometimes you see someone and your gut gets all twisted up and you don’t even know why?”
To his surprise, Eli was smiling. “So she’s got your gut all twisted up, does she?”
He should have realized this was a mistake, Mike thought. “She?” he repeated, a defensive edge in his voice.
Eli shook his head. “Yeah, ‘she.’ Sam,” he clarified—as if he had to. “I know that you sure as hell weren’t just talking about the way you feel about your horse. You’ve known him for a long time and this is the first time we’re having this conversation, so it’s about a woman. The woman,” he underscored.
“We’re not having this conversation,” Mike announced, picking up the ax again.
“Look, what you just described as a twisted gut only comes along once in a lifetime—if that,” Eli emphasized. “And if it does and you don’t do anything about it—”
“Yeah? What?” Mike demanded. “If I don’t do anything about it, then what?”
“Then you’re a damn jackass if you don’t go tell her how you feel,” Eli concluded heatedly. “Because you’re never going to feel like this about another woman again.”
Mike didn’t exactly see it that way. “I’ll feel like a jackass if I tell her and she still leaves,” he fired back at his younger brother.
“But at least you would have tried,” Eli insisted. He put his hand on Mike’s shoulder, trying to get through to him. “What’s the worst thing that can happen if you go talk to her? She leaves? Well, she’s leaving now, isn’t she? The way I see it, the only thing you’re risking by telling her how you feel is getting her to stay.”
Angry, confused and utterly torn, Mike put the ax down again. “You’re not going to shut up until I go talk to her, are you?”
Eli grinned. “You know, you’re not as dumb as you look.”
Disgusted, Mike muttered something under his breath as he began to stride toward the house.
“Oh, and Mike,” he called out, raising his voice, “about that winning personality of yours—”
Mike turned and looked at his brother over his shoulder. “Yeah?”
“Leave it out here,” Eli suggested. “You’ll do a lot better without it.”
Mike bit off a response that rose to his lips. He didn’t have any more time to waste out here, talking to Eli. He had a woman he needed to convince to stay in a town that was no bigger than a tear.
Chapter Seventeen
Sam had always made it a point to travel light for a reason. That way, she could be packed and ready to go in no time at all.
It was taking longer this time. Longer because of all the memories that were going into the suitcase along with her clothes. Her suitcase didn’t seem to be big enough to hold all of them.
As for packing up her actual clothing, that should have been a sna
p. It always had been before.
But this time, she was moving in slow motion. It was, she thought, remembering a description her mother had once used, as if she had glue in her veins. Glue that had already dried.
Consequently, she was less than half done when she heard the light knock on her door.
“Door’s not locked.”
Feeling her heart accelerating, Sam turned around in time to see Olivia and Angel peering into her room before entering. She wasn’t sure who she was more surprised to see, the sheriff’s wife, who was also one of the town’s attorneys, or Gabe’s new bride, the chef who Miss Joan swore by.
“May we come in?” Olivia asked. She and Angel were still on the other side of the bedroom’s threshold.
“Sure. You don’t need my permission,” Sam told them. “This isn’t even going to be my room in an hour.”
That was how much longer she had here, Sam thought. An hour. Sixty short minutes and then this was all going to be behind her.
Just the very thought made her heart ache.
“That’s kind of what we came to see you about,” Angel told her in her quiet cadence. “Gabe’s father called us. Miguel thought that maybe between the two of us, Olivia and I might be able to talk you into staying a little while longer.”
Sam noticed that Olivia had moved her open suitcase from the bed onto the desk and then she and Angel sat down in the newly vacated space.
“Really, I’d love to,” Sam began to explain.
Hearing what she wanted to hear, Olivia was quick to interrupt in hopes of cutting off anything that might come after that initial assertion. “Then there’s no problem,” she declared.
“But I can’t,” Sam said firmly, concluding her sentence. “I’ve finished what I was sent here to do.”
She’d intentionally dragged her feet, but it was finally done. She’d even left a rough draft of her finished product for Miguel to read over once she left. She intended to drop him a note to let him know where to find the draft. It was easier that way. She couldn’t bear having him go over the reworked diary, into which she had put more than a piece of herself, while she was anywhere near him.
“And I’ve got another book lined up to work on,” she told the women.
“And you can’t work on the book from here?” Olivia asked.
Sam shook her head, not allowing herself to even entertain that possibility. Her method was to always be hands-on. She’d never worked any other way and she couldn’t think about switching now. What was the point? Mike didn’t really seem to care if she stayed or went.
“No.”
“Not even with Skype and all the advantages of modern conferencing?” Olivia pressed.
“No,” Sam assured her firmly. “Look, I had a really wonderful time here and believe me, if I could stay, I would, but—”
“Would you?” Olivia interrupted, the lawyer in her coming to the foreground as she questioned Sam.
Sam said nothing. There was no point in arguing about this. She had to leave and it didn’t matter if the whole town came to try to talk her into remaining. The one person who should be talking to her hadn’t said a single meaningful word on the subject.
“Miguel felt we were the best equipped to talk to you about staying because we each had to make a choice to remain in Forever or go back to the world that we came from,” Angel told her. “Olivia was a partner in a large criminal law firm and well on her way to the top while I had a pretty good career going myself,” she added modestly without elaborating. “We chose happiness over material things and neither one of us have ever regretted it,” she concluded with feeling.
It was a lovely story, Sam thought, but it had nothing to do with her. Both women remained because the men they loved had come forward to ask them to stay.
That wasn’t the case with her.
She was about to beg off, saying she was running behind when the women tag-teamed her again and Olivia started talking once more.
“Think about what your leaving is going to do to Mike,” she warned.
Sam didn’t bother trying to stifle her laugh. Her leaving would do less than nothing to Mike if the past twelve hours was anything to go on.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine. When I told him I was leaving last night, he just took it in stride,” she told them in a lofty tone that was meant to hide the hurt beneath. “It’s obviously no big deal for him.”
Olivia fixed her with a disappointed look. “Really? I thought you were more observant than that.”
“There’s nothing to observe,” Sam told her crisply. “Mike wasn’t even around this morning.”
She’d woken up to an empty bed and an emptiness inside of her that felt like an insurmountable chasm. Only when she came down to breakfast did she find out that he was already out, doing “chores.” As far as she was concerned, Mike’s main “chore” was avoiding her.
She didn’t want a man who would rather disappear than try to fight for her, at least verbally.
“A man like Mike has trouble showing his emotions,” Angel tried to tell her. “That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them.”
“That doesn’t mean that he does, either,” Sam countered.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Angel insisted softly. “Everyone in the family’s noticed that he’s gotten friendlier, happier and less serious, especially since Thanksgiving.”
Was it her imagination, or was Angel looking at her pointedly?
“You leave,” Olivia warned, “and he’s going to come apart at the seams.”
Sam sincerely doubted that. “Oh, he’s a lot more resilient than you’re giving him credit for,” she assured the sheriff’s wife.
“Ordinarily, I’d say yes, but in this case, I’ve got some very real doubts. People like Mike and me don’t give our hearts easily, but when we do, it’s forever. Haven’t you noticed that he’s different now than he’d been when you first got here?”
Sam shrugged, feeling helpless. There was probably a logical explanation for that.
“Maybe,” she allowed
“No ‘maybe’ about it,” Olivia told her with conviction. “Think about it,” she urged Sam, giving her arm a squeeze. “You really don’t want to do something you’re going to live to regret.”
Turning, she nodded at Angel and then she and Angel withdrew, leaving Sam to contemplate the inside of her half-filled suitcase, feeling as if she was damned if she left and damned if she stayed. But sticking to a schedule had seen her through the worst of times and she deliberately had a schedule to stick to now.
So hop to it, Sam. Stop being so mopey. You had a good time, you wrote a good book, now go before you ruin everything by being clingy.
With a sigh, Sam began packing again only to once more be interrupted by yet another knock on her door.
Humor curved her lips ever so slightly. They just didn’t give up, did they?
“What did you forget to say?” she asked before turning toward the doorway to see, she assumed, Olivia and Angel returning.
Except that wasn’t what she saw at all.
“I forgot to say ‘Don’t go.’”
Sam’s eyes widened as she stared at him. “Mike?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten what I look like already,” Mike said flippantly, walking in. “You haven’t even left yet.”
The words weren’t coming, as if stuck on flypaper in her head. When she finally spoke, it was almost haltingly.
“I didn’t forget. I’m just—stunned, I guess, for lack of a better word. Who put you up to this?” she asked.
He looked at her, confused. “What?”
Okay, maybe she was talking too fast. She had a tendency to do that when she became agitated. Sam tried again.
“Angel and Olivia were just here. They said that I shou
ldn’t go because, well, just because,” she said, thinking it best not to embarrass him with details that probably weren’t true anyway. “Your father asked them to talk to me. Did he talk to you about this, about my leaving?” she asked.
Mike shook his head. “No.”
She thought of the other possibility. “Then did they talk to you? Olivia and Angel,” she said to refresh his memory.
“Not since Thanksgiving,” he told her. He knew what she was thinking. That he wouldn’t have come here on his own. Apparently he had some surprises left up his sleeve. “Why?” he asked her. “Don’t you think I can think for myself?”
“Sure, just not about—” Oh, hell, her tongue was getting tied up in a knot. “Damn it, this is really awkward.”
“Then let me make it less awkward,” Mike volunteered. When she started to say something, he laid his finger against her lips to silence her. “I know you have to work, I know that this is what you like to do. I’ve walked in on you while you were working often enough to see that you look as if you’re practically glowing. I’m not going to ask you to give that up.”
So much for that, she thought, dejected. She did her best to mask her feelings. “Okay then, I’d better finish packing.”
As she turned toward the suitcase, he caught her arms and turned her back around to face him. “But I am going to ask you to come back.”
She stared at him as if he’d suddenly started to talk in a strange language. “What?”
“I’m going to ask you to come back,” he repeated. “And to keep coming back.” His eyes held hers as he added, “To me.”
Her breath backed up in her throat. But she was afraid to believe what she thought he was saying. There had to be another explanation.
“And why should I do that?” she asked, her voice sounding deceptively quiet.
Okay, here it was, all or nothing, Mike thought. But if he didn’t risk it, there was no chance of winning all the marbles.
So he risked it.
“Because I’m asking you to. Because I love you and because if I had to deal with a world without you in it for the rest of my life, that life wouldn’t go on for very long.”
A Small Town Thanksgiving Page 17
