Loving the Storm

by Linda Seed

  “Well, good, because it would probably be bullshit,” Ryan observed.

  “But we’ll go with that if you need us to,” Breanna offered.

  “Maybe just sit here for a minute,” Liam said.

  They all sat together, drinking, silently absorbing all that had happened. Liam reflected, not for the first time, that it was a good thing to have family.

  After a while, Liam said, “All of this?” He gestured to indicate the room, the house, the meal lovingly prepared by their mother that they were even now ignoring, all of them in the room, and the entirety of all they had here. “She never had this. Not any of it.” He shook his head, his jaw tight. “She never had anybody to come up to her room and check on her when her world went to shit.”

  They all, by silent, mutual agreement, ignored the implication that Liam’s world had gone to shit. That seemed to go without saying, anyway.

  “She’s scared,” Breanna said. “Scared to hope for more than she has.”

  “I get that. Fear, I mean. Hell, we’re all scared of something,” Colin said.

  “I’m scared of fatherhood,” Ryan offered. “What if I screw it up? What the hell do I know about raising a kid?” He shook his head thoughtfully and took a drink of bourbon.

  “I’m scared I’m going to fuck it all up,” Colin said. “The money, I mean. Handling the investments for the whole family? I mean … what if I make a mistake? What if I ruin things for everyone? Everybody’s counting on me.” He held out his glass to Ryan for a refill.

  “I’m fuckin’ terrified that she’s the one, and I ruined it, and I’m never going to get her to come back.” Liam swallowed hard and rubbed his face with his hand.

  After a moment, they all looked at Breanna.

  “The love of my life is dead,” she said. “I’m not scared of anything anymore. The worst has already happened.”

  Half a bottle of bourbon later, Liam went downstairs to apologize to his mother for ruining the meal.

  She was in the kitchen washing dishes when he found her. He nudged her aside with his shoulder and took the dishrag out of her hands.

  “I’ll do this.” He picked up a dirty plate and began to rinse it under the tap.

  “You’re offering to do the dishes?” She let out a grunt. “By God, that’s got to be a Christmas miracle.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He began to wash the dish, and the hot, soapy water was surprisingly soothing.

  He handed her the clean dish, and she began to dry it. They had a dishwasher, of course, but it was already full with the pots and pans she’d used to prepare the meal. The machine swished away under the counter.

  “I’m sorry,” he said after a while. “About dinner.”

  “Pfft. It’s just a meal. We’ve had thousands of ‘em.”

  “It was Christmas dinner, and you worked hard on it. The others should have stayed, at least.”

  “Hmph. Who do you think sent ‘em up there?” she barked at him.

  He stopped what he was doing and raised his eyebrows in question.

  “Sometimes a man needs his brothers and his sister, I guess,” Sandra said. She looked at the plate she was drying and not at Liam.

  “I guess,” he agreed.

  They worked side by side in silence for a few minutes. Then Sandra said, “Boy, are you all right?”

  He didn’t know how to answer that. He didn’t feel all right—he felt gutted, emptied out of all but his tough outer shell. But he was more all right than Aria, wasn’t he? He had a warm, noisy home full of people who loved him. What did she have? What would she ever have, if she ran from the chance for everything good?

  “I’ll be okay,” he said, because he would be, one way or another. Things happened, and you survived. But he wanted to do so much more than survive. And he wanted more than that for Aria, too.

  He washed a casserole dish and handed it to his mother.

  “She doesn’t know how to be happy,” he told her. “She never has been, and she just doesn’t know how to do it.”

  She took the casserole dish from him and began to dry it. “Well, if that’s the case, boy, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Me?” He looked at her in surprise. “What the hell can I do?”

  “Somebody doesn’t know how to do something, they need somebody to show them how,” she said, as though that were obvious. “You think you were born knowing how to ride a horse?” She grunted. “Hell, no. Your uncle Redmond taught you how to do it, and you practiced, and then you knew.”

  He wondered whether she had a point. Was happiness a skill that one could learn, like tying your shoes or doing algebra? All at once, he knew what really worried him, and he said it, for the first time.

  “She needs somebody better than me to teach her. I don’t think I even know how to do it.”

  Sandra cackled. “Well, by God, son, you’re the one the good Lord gave her. You’d better figure it out.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Aria fully expected Liam to come after her, and when he didn’t, she was immeasurably relieved. If he’d come after her, she would have been tempted to let him take her into his arms, to let him make promises he would never be able to keep.

  Love was a fairy tale, and she didn’t believe in it any more than she believed in Santa or Bigfoot.

  If this felt like love, well, emotions were irrational. You couldn’t trust them. You couldn’t base your decisions on them.

  She walked back to the guesthouse at a fast, purposeful pace. She wanted to put as much space between herself and the Delaney family as possible. Being around them made her soft, made her want things she could never have. And she couldn’t be soft.

  That was no way to survive.

  She was cold and out of breath by the time she got back to the guesthouse. She lit the gas fire in the fireplace and sat perched on the edge of the sofa, her hands pressed between her knees.

  She needed to get away from here.

  Not just away from the Delaney house, but away from their property, their guesthouse—hell, away from their entire state.

  He loved her? What made him think he was even capable of that? No one had ever loved her—not really, and not for long. What made Liam Delaney think he could manage such a thing, when everyone else had failed?

  The longer she stayed here, the more damage it was going to do to both of them when the whole thing inevitably went up in flames.

  She got up from the sofa, went into the bedroom, and started packing her things.

  She would be out of here before morning, and Liam could get on with his life. They both could.

  Liam woke up the next morning feeling groggy. Sunlight streamed in through his bedroom window, and he looked at the clock on his bedside table.

  Seven a.m.

  Jesus, he should have been up two hours ago. He hadn’t meant to sleep late, and he was surprised he had. He was even more surprised the rest of the household had let him do it. Clearly, it was a measure of how pathetic he was. Nobody in this family cut anybody any slack when it came to getting work done. For them to let him sleep this late, they must have worried that he was damned near suicidal.

  He wasn’t, but he felt like a warmed-over pile of shit all the same.

  Recognizing that self-pity was for lesser men than himself, Liam hauled himself out of bed and walked down the hall in his pajama pants to take a shower.

  Once he was under the hot spray, he tried to put everything in perspective.

  This was a setback, it wasn’t the end of the world. He could go over to the barn later today and talk to her, find out exactly what had gone wrong and why. He had his ideas about why she was so afraid of having feelings for him, but his ideas probably weren’t exactly right. If they could just talk it out, then he could understand her better, and that would lead them to have something even stronger than before.

  This wasn’t a problem. This was an opportunity. It was a chance for him to show Aria that he could be sensitive to her feelings. It was a cha
nce to show her that he could stick.

  He had a headache from drinking too much the night before, but even so, he was feeling a little bit better about things by the time he got out of the shower and toweled off. He’d long since stopped believing that things between him and women were supposed to be easy. Fuck easy. He could do this. He didn’t need it to be easy.

  He got dressed and went down to the kitchen to grab some coffee before going out to work. He poured himself a cup and found some aspirin in the cabinet over the coffee pot. He took two, then chased them with hot, black coffee.

  Liam was holding out some hope that he might be able to get out the door and to work before his mother saw him, but that hope was dashed when she came into the kitchen a minute later, her bunny slippers on her feet and the apron she’d worn while cooking breakfast still fastened around her waist.

  “Well, boy, it’s about time you showed your face,” she snapped at him. “Them cattle just can’t wait around for you to get your beauty sleep.”

  She was scolding him because it was expected of her. If she’d wanted him up at five, he’d have been up at five. She’d felt sorry for him, and that was harder to take than the headache.

  “I’m just getting my coffee, and then I’ll be out of here,” he told her.

  “What, you’re planning to work without breakfast? I thought I taught you better than that, son.” She scowled at him and opened the refrigerator, taking out milk, eggs, and butter.

  “You don’t have to cook again, Mom. I can just—”

  “Now, stop yapping and sit down,” she said. “The day I can’t make a couple of eggs for my son is the day they wheel me out of here with a sheet over my face.”

  Since that matter seemed to be settled, Liam sat down while she fired up the burner under a cast iron pan and began to make scrambled eggs. While she was doing that, she popped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster and poured a glass of orange juice, which she placed in front of him.

  “Somebody should have woke me up,” Liam commented.

  “Hmph. I figured you needed the sleep. You had a pretty rough night, I guess.”

  Liam shrugged. “I guess.”

  A few minutes later, he had a steaming plate of eggs in front of him, along with two thick pieces of buttered toast. He dug in, feeling hungrier than he’d thought he was.

  As he ate, Sandra sat down across from him, her arms folded in front of her on the table, something on her mind.

  “I guess you’d better say what you have to say, Mom,” Liam told her. “If you’re going to tell me I’m wasting my time with Aria, then—”

  “I wasn’t going to say any such thing, and I wish you’d let me speak for myself instead of wasting your time guessing,” she shot back.

  He waited silently for her to continue. For once, she didn’t seem to have a speech ready to come fully formed from her mouth. She took a moment to gather her thoughts, and then she reached out and put one of her hands over his—a gesture that surprised him so much he blinked a few times to reorient himself.

  “That girl needs you,” she said finally. He started to say something, and she cut him off by holding up one finger between them.

  “Now, I know you’ve had some relationship troubles,” she went on. “I know you’ve had some rough times.” She cleared her throat a little, and he was alarmed to realize she was trying not to cry. “You’ve got a big heart, son. And that’s not always easy.”

  “Mom—”

  “But if you let Aria go because you’re afraid of getting that big heart of yours broken again, then you’re not the man I think you are.”

  She seemed to be considering something, then she nodded in answer to a question only she knew.

  “She’s got a look about her,” Sandra said. “It’s a look that says she doesn’t know what it’s like to be able to count on someone, so she thinks it’s hopeless to even try. I know that look because I saw it in my own damned mirror more than once. Now, what do you suppose would have happened if your father hadn’t thought I was worth the effort?”

  She squeezed his hand, stood up, and started cleaning up the mess from Liam’s breakfast.

  “Now, that’s all of I’ve got to say on the matter,” she told him as she stood at the sink, her back to him.

  Liam felt a bit stunned at the idea of his mother as a young woman in a crisis of confidence. She’d always seemed so self-assured, so rock solid, that it was hard to imagine she’d ever been any other way.

  “Mom …”

  “I told you, that’s all I have to say,” she snapped at him. “Now, you’d better get on out of here so Ryan doesn’t have to do all the damned work.”

  Liam had a hard time focusing on work, but he told himself to get his shit together and take care of the things that needed to get done. Ryan was kind of tiptoeing around him, as though Liam might suddenly snap and beat the crap out of one of the ranch hands.

  He might have done that, but he was too distracted by thoughts of what he was going to say to Aria when he saw her.

  Really, why the fuck did he have to go and say he loved her? He did, but that wasn’t the point. She wasn’t ready to hear it, and he goddamned well knew it. Why couldn’t he have just kept his mouth shut until she was in the same place he was? She’d have gotten there eventually—he felt sure of that. But she wasn’t there yet, and he’d pushed her.

  Well, that was done, and it couldn’t be undone. All he could do now was go to her and talk it out. He wouldn’t take back what he’d said, because it was true. But he could smooth things over, reassure her that he wasn’t in a rush, that he could wait for her as long as it took.

  He was so focused on his strategy that he didn’t hear Ryan talking to him until the man was standing in front of him, waving a hand in front of his face.

  “Hello? Anybody in there?”

  “What?”

  “Are you planning to get some actual work done sometime today, or do I have to do enough to carry both of us?” Ryan asked.

  “Ah, bite me.”

  They were in the stables, and Ryan leaned against the door of the stall where they’d put the new filly. He’d just finished checking the hoof where she’d thrown a shoe that morning.

  “Look, if you just want to knock off and go out there to see her …”

  “I can work,” Liam said.

  “I guess you can,” Ryan agreed. “But you’re so distracted I’m afraid you’re going to let a horse throw you again, and you’re going to break the other damned leg. And then you really won’t be any good to me.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m only half joking.”

  Liam had to admit—if only to himself—that Ryan had a point. But he’d be damned if he was going to admit to his brother that he didn’t have his head in the game.

  “I can work twice as hard as you could on your best goddamned day,” Liam said. To prove his point, he went into the stall where his own horse was standing and started screwing around with the tack, just to look like he was doing something.

  “All right.” Ryan was done with the filly for now, so he turned and headed toward the door. On his way out, he turned and faced Liam. “Look. I know you don’t want my advice, but—”

  “You’re right, I don’t.”

  “But,” Ryan continued as though Liam hadn’t spoken, “you’d better get your ass out to the guesthouse. Being married has taught me a little bit about women, and you don’t want to wait too long to smooth things over.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah, it is. You think you’re just giving her space, letting her get her head together. But every minute that passes before you go out there, she’s more and more convinced that you just don’t give a shit.”

  This came as a surprise to Liam. He raised his eyebrows, considering it. “She is?”

  “She is. So, by the time you finally get out there, the fight’s not going to be about whatever it was originally about. Instead, it’s going to be about how you didn’
t even care enough to go out there and try to get her back.”

  This was a possibility that hadn’t occurred to Liam until this moment.

  “Seriously. I can handle things here,” Ryan said.

  On his way over there, Liam had himself halfway convinced that things weren’t as bad as they’d seemed to be last night. Aria had been emotional and impulsive, and when she’d said she couldn’t do this, of course she hadn’t meant the relationship as a whole. She’d just meant the holiday, the family gathering, the dreaded I love you that had sent her into such a damned tailspin.

  All he had to do was talk it through with her. Or maybe the best thing was not to talk at all. Maybe they’d skip that part and go straight to the making up.

  He was feeling encouraged by that thought, until he got to the guesthouse and saw that her car wasn’t there.

  It was late morning; maybe she’d gone into town for something or other. Maybe she’d gone to grab a few groceries at the Cookie Crock, or to get a cup of coffee at Jitters. Maybe she was at Daniel Reed’s place working on the skylight for her yurt.

  He decided to wait a bit to see if she came home. If she was just out for a quick errand, he figured it shouldn’t take too long.

  He had a key to the guesthouse, and he took a moment to consider whether it would be an invasion of her privacy for him to go inside and wait for her there. His first instinct was to say it wouldn’t, because she’d told him to just let himself in any number of times since they’d started sleeping together.

  But this might be different, in her mind, after what had happened last night. She might expect him to understand that he couldn’t do that anymore.

  He weighed his options, then decided to go inside. She’d never explicitly revoked his key privileges, after all.

  He thought about sending her a text message, but decided it would be better to wait to see her in person.

  He took his keys out of his pocket, unlocked the door, and stepped inside.

  He felt the emptiness of the place before he saw it. There was an unoccupied feel to the cottage that he noticed before he even turned on the lights and saw that she’d cleaned it out.