“Well. It was nice to meet you, Lane,” she said, pleasantly enough, she thought. But no sooner had she picked up a pair of cucumbers off the stack in front of her—which she didn’t need, either, not to mention having no cart to put them in—than he said, “Would you do me the honor of having dinner with me tonight?”
Slowly she replaced the cucumbers, then turned to meet what sure as hell looked like a sincere gaze. “Thought you said you were leavin’?”
He smiled in the way of a man having something up his sleeve. “It’s not written in stone,” he said, and the fluttering increased twenty-fold. By this time, a small crowd had gathered around Millie Pennyweather like iron filings to a magnet, which meant, if Ivy accepted, within a hour half the town would know she’d just allowed a total stranger—his having stayed out at Sam’s for the past few days notwithstanding—to pick her up. In broad daylight.
And then those blue eyes twinkled and she thought, Eat your hearts out, you old bats.
“In that case,” she said with a smile she hadn’t had occasion to use for more than twenty years, “I’d be delighted to have dinner with you, Lane Stewart.”
She heard a collective gasp, followed by—from clear over by the deli counter—what sure sounded like her daughter’s whoop of approval.
All of which was completely obliterated when Lane gave her a wink that warmed her clear down to her worn-out Birkenstocks.
Chapter 6
All Carly could think was, I do not believe this.
They were standing downstairs in the empty farmhouse next to Sam’s. Her father was grinning like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. She, however, was not. “Dad. You can’t be serious.”
Oh, boy—she hadn’t seen that look in a long time. “I hate that apartment, Lee. I miss having a house to work on, and I’ve got nothing left in Cinci anymore. So give me one good reason why I shouldn’t do this?”
She could hear Sam’s footsteps creaking on the floorboards upstairs. “You’ll be glad to know,” he called down, “that all the windows are sound up here.” Sam was clearly tickled pink about the prospect of having her father as his neighbor. Not that she blamed him, but still.
“Because…because this is a whim! You haven’t thought this through—”
“Actually, I’ve been thinking about this practically nonstop ever since we saw this place. It’s not as spur-of-the-moment as you might think.” Stuffing his hands into his khaki pockets, Dad walked over to the window looking out over fields she knew he’d never work. “Even though I know it must seem out of character.”
“There’s an understatement.”
He turned, smiling. “Some things can’t be explained, honey. Like how a man knows when he’s come home. And frankly, it doesn’t have to make sense to anybody but me.”
“Does this by any chance have something to do with the woman in the store?”
His expression got all hazy. “Maybe.”
“That is nuts, Dad! You talked to her for, what, five minutes? What do you know about her?”
He shrugged, unconcerned. “Nothing.” Then his mouth curved. “Yet.”
“But she’s nothing like Mom!”
“And maybe I’m not looking for a copy of my favorite movie. Maybe I’d like to see something where I don’t already know the words.”
Whoa. Not that his words made him sound any less crazy—if anything, they only reinforced her conviction—but whoa, all the same.
Dad wandered out onto what passed for a porch, but Carly dragged herself over to the stairs—each wooden tread more bowed than the next—and sank onto the third step from the bottom, understanding neither her father’s calm nor why her brain felt as though it was being ripped apart by some brutal centrifugal force. She rammed her hands through her loose hair: Why did she feel so…left out? After all, it wasn’t as if she and Dad hung out all the time, or that either of them needed the other. And wasn’t this what she wanted, for him to move past his grief, to see him jump-start his life?
Except jump-starting his life in rural Oklahoma hadn’t exactly been what she’d imagined.
“Hey,” she heard behind her, a split second before she caught Sam’s scent, felt his warmth through her cotton sweater. “Where’d Lane get to?”
“Outside,” she said, with a quick swipe at her cheeks, a vague gesture toward the front door. The stair treads not being wide enough for two butts, Sam lowered himself to the step above hers, the outside of one long leg grazing her shoulder. She was so distraught, she almost didn’t notice.
“You don’t want him to do this, do you?”
“Wouldn’t be my first choice, no.”
“Got any idea why?”
She twisted around, her breath hitching at the gentle strength in those warm green eyes. A strength that did a pretty good job at masking the loneliness she knew lurked right on the other side. “This isn’t like him, you know? He’s never been impulsive in his life.” Turning back, she said, “I’m the one who goes off half-cocked. Dad was always the one telling me to think things through….” Her throat constricted; no one was more surprised than she to hear herself say, “I’m supposed to be the one escaping him. Not the other way around.”
She started at the steady, warm pressure of Sam’s fingers massaging the juncture between her shoulder and neck. Her head was determined not to respond, but her body clearly had other ideas. “And then,” she plowed on, “he apparently has a…crush or something on this woman he met at the store.”
“You mean Ivy?”
That was worth screwing herself back around for. “You already know?”
“Honey, high-speed Internet has nothing on the Haven grapevine. In any case, Libby couldn’t get the words out fast enough when y’all got back from the grocery store. Said it was the first time she’d ever seen Ivy look flustered.”
Carly frowned. “She didn’t look flustered to me.”
“Which only goes to show how serious this is.” He stopped massaging; a twinge of regret passed through her. “Whether or not your dad and Ivy would ever work together, I have no idea. But you won’t find a better human being, or a bigger heart. She speaks her mind, that’s for sure, and heaven help your dad if he screws her over.” Carly made a face, and his chuckle did things to her insides that scared her half to death. “I’m just saying. But I’ve known Ivy Gardner for more than thirty years, and if anybody deserves happiness, it’s that woman.”
“So does Dad, but…” She turned back around. “Oh, Sam…what on earth is my sixty-three-year-old father going to do with a farm?”
“Well, it’ll take him a good ten years just to fix up the house,” he said behind her, his smile evident in his voice. Carly huffed out a sigh, which he apparently found amusing. But then he said, “Actually, he and I have already discussed it, and he’s going to lease a good portion of the land back to me. I’ve been working it anyway to keep it in shape, paying my brother part of the profits. Lane’s not planning on being a farmer, if that’s what’s worrying you. I expect he just wants to live out in the country. Have you seen the barn?”
“No, I haven’t seen the barn. I don’t want to see the barn. I want…”
“What?” he said softly, his breath teasing her hair. Or it might have been a breeze whisking down the stairs from an open window. “What do you want, Carly?”
“My life back, dammit!” she said, and the tears started up all over again. She clamped a hand across her mouth, although in a lame attempt to staunch the tears or the thought that brought them on, she had no idea.
“Change is damn scary, that’s for sure,” Sam said. “Especially when there’s no time to prepare for it.”
Refusing to look at him, she nodded.
He released a breath, then said, “I think what most shook me up after Jeannie’s passing, even more than the obvious fact that she wasn’t here anymore, was that nothing—nothing—was the same. I hadn’t realized how much I’d taken my life for granted, how much I’d somehow expected everything to keep on
the way it had been. I knew there’d be changes, sure—the kids would grow up and eventually go on to have lives and families of their own—but it was still part of the plan, you know? Jeannie dying wasn’t part of the plan.” After a moment, he said, “Your knee givin’ out on you wasn’t part of your plan. Neither was your daddy deciding his idea of ‘moving on’ wasn’t the same as yours.”
She dug a wadded up tissue out of her pocket, blew her nose, and scowled. “Do you always have an answer for everything?”
He chuckled, the warm sound filling the emptiness of the room, even as it maybe plugged up a tiny hole in her heart as well. “Hardly. Hell, half the time, I don’t feel like I’ve got an answer for anything.”
She dared to look at him, a reluctant smile tugging at her mouth. “Like when you’re talking to Libby?”
“Exactly.” Then his own smile softened, even as his eyes linked with hers in a way she couldn’t ever remember happening before, as if he somehow understood her in a way she didn’t even understand herself. “But I’ve had a lot of time to think about that particular subject, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to share.” Underneath his plaid shirt, the kind of shoulders a woman could get used to leaning on rose, then fell. “Take from it what you will. It’s free, after all.”
A laugh burst from her own throat, a surprised sound, like a car backfiring. Then she said, “All my life, I’ve been fighting my father for the right to live my life as I saw fit, without his interference. Or commentary. I guess…the tables are turned, aren’t they?”
“In other words, you have to let him go.”
“Yeah. Oh, God…how I must have scared the crap out of him.”
“So what are you going to do?”
Twisting one of her rings around her index finger, she pushed out a sigh. “I suppose, if he really wants this…”
“I really do,” Dad said from the doorway.
Oh, hell…how could she deny him his shot at whatever peace he could find? “Then I guess the least I can do is help you move out here.”
With a grin, Dad opened his arms. Carly pushed herself off the stairs and walked into them, thinking how ironic it was that she should finally feel close to her father, right when he was about to remove himself from her life. While she might find it in her heart to eventually accept his harebrained idea, if this was where he wanted to live, he was on his own. Because no way in hell would she ever call Haven, Oklahoma, home.
“What makes you so sure she’s gonna end up staying here?”
Firmly planted in one of the porch rockers, Sam narrowed his eyes at the dark-haired man ensconced on the ancient glider a few feet away. Joe Salazar’s eight-year-old half brother, Seth, and Sam’s Wade had spent the afternoon together after school, but when Joe’d come to pick Seth up, the boys had insisted they were “in the middle of somethin’.” Hence the ten minute break on Sam’s porch. Hard to believe that Joe, who’d only come to Haven to oversee the remodel of the Double Arrow, had been a complete stranger not four months ago. But the town had sucked the brothers to its bosom, as the town was wont to do, and now it was as if they’d always been here.
As witnessed by how easily, and completely, Joe had grafted himself onto the grapevine. True, most of the male population viewed gossiping as women’s work, but every once in a while a subject came up that transcended gender. And Carly Stewart was apparently one of those topics. Ruby’s husband Jordy down at the diner even had a pool going, about whether she’d stay or not. Last Sam heard, the pot was up to a hundred bucks.
Not that he was a part of it or anything. Sam was not a gambling man, his long-standing game of craps with Mother Nature notwithstanding.
So now he took a swallow of his iced tea, watching his other boys—and half the dogs—chase a soccer ball around the yard, and said, “I’m not sure. I’ve just got a hunch, is all.” He balanced his glass on the arm of the rocker, half expecting to hear a little hissss as the condensation trickled over his heated fingers. After a couple of fall-like days, the temperature had bounced right back up again, like the weather couldn’t make up its mind what it wanted to be. Just like Sam couldn’t decide what, exactly, he felt about Carly. “She cares too much about her father to just leave him, for one thing. No matter what she says. And for another…” He let another swallow of tea slide down his parched throat. “I get the feeling that gal’s lookin’ for something.”
“Like what?”
He remembered her wretched expression last Sunday afternoon in her father’s “new” living room, an image that hadn’t diminished any in the five days since she and Lane had left. “A life. A new one, I mean.”
“And you think she can find it here?”
“You did, didn’t you?”
The other man chuckled. “Walked right into that one, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did. And speaking of which…you and Taylor pick a date yet?”
That got another grin, obviously for the pretty red-haired kindergarten teacher, a relative newcomer to Haven herself, who’d stolen Joe’s heart. And healed his little brother’s, broken to bits after the little boy’s parents’ sudden deaths this past spring.
“Around Christmas, maybe. Since we’re not interested in waiting too long.”
Not that they had, from what he’d gathered, Sam thought in amusement as he kicked back the rest of his tea, then set his glass on the floor beside the rocker. Like wisps of fog, memories of the weeks leading up to his and Jeannie’s wedding floated through his brain, all that seemingly endless agony of anticipation, made even hotter in no small measure by their youth, he imagined. Except then he glanced over and caught the funny smile on Joe’s face and thought, then again, maybe being older doesn’t lessen the thrill at all.
“You think it’s true,” Joe said, “about Lane moving here because of Ivy?”
Then Sam thought of the look on Lane Stewart’s face the morning after his date with Ivy Gardner and thought, nope, the thrill doesn’t diminish one iota. A fact that might come in handy, some day down the road.
“I think it’s safe to say she’s a large part of it, yep.”
“Think he’s got has a chance?”
“Have no idea.” Much to everyone’s chagrin, the couple had gone clear to Tulsa for their date, so nobody had a firsthand account of the event. And Ivy wasn’t talking, not even to Dawn. Who, as the town attorney, had drawn up the papers for the property sale. And Sam, acting as proxy for his brother, could tell it was clearly irking her that the first man to take Ivy out in more than twenty years was being as closemouthed as her mother.
“How about you?” Joe asked.
“What about me?”
“Well, since you brought up the subject of Carly’s sticking around, or not…” He let the sentence trail off.
Sam let it stay trailed for some time, then said, “Stating my opinion about whether or not she’ll stay is not the same as expressing a personal interest.”
“Of course not.”
“You know, you could at least try to keep a straight face.”
Joe laughed. “I’m only saying for somebody without a personal interest, you seem to be staring at the woman a lot.”
“That’s only because it was driving me nuts, trying to figure her out.”
“I see. Like she was one of those mind-bender puzzle things.”
“Exactly.” Sam folded his hands behind his head, savoring the rare moment of relaxation. Except there was nothing at all relaxing about this conversation. “I’ll admit I find her intriguing. But that’s all.” At his friend’s smirk, he said, “Oh, come on…what on earth would I do with somebody like that?”
“It’d come back to you, I’m sure.”
Sam grunted, then said, “Joe, half the time the woman looked at my kids like they’d escaped from the zoo.” A loud, rude noise sounded from across the yard, sparking peals of laughter. “Not that I blame her,” he said, as whoever was responsible for the sound effect gave an encore. “Shoot, there were times when I’d no sooner wa
lk in the door that Jeannie’d go sailing out of it, declaring if she didn’t get away from them immediately, she couldn’t be held accountable for her actions. And she was their mama. She’d wanted them. And she loved them, even in those moments when I think she’d’ve taken a buck-fifty for the lot and never batted an eye. And then there’s Libby in the throes of teenage angst….”
The screen door slammed behind them as Seth and Wade came barreling outside and down into the yard. Joe propelled himself to his feet, digging out his car keys from his pocket, then turned amused, dark eyes to Sam. “So what you’re saying is—” he slipped on his sunglasses “—there’s no room in your life for this woman, right?”
Suspicion pulled up a chair and settled right in beside him. “Where are you goin’ with this?”
“Just wondering if you realize that—what, two weeks ago?—you would’ve said there’s wasn’t room in your life for any woman?”
“C’mon, Joe—let’s go!” Seth called out. “I’m hungry!”
“Yes, sir,” Joe muttered good-naturedly before, with a wave to Sam, he made his loose-limbed way down the porch steps and over to his Blazer, neatly removing himself from the scene before Sam had a chance to come up with a fitting response to Joe’s “observation.” And no sooner had Joe and Seth driven off than everybody ganged up on Sam, demanding food. Everybody except Libby, who was holed up in her room with homework. Or so she said. So it wasn’t until Sam took himself down to the cellar to find something to feed all his baby birds that he finally had a chance to mull over Joe’s words.
Words that, unfortunately, couldn’t have been more dead-on.
Still, he thought as he rummaged around in the smaller of the two SUV-size freezers, grateful for the billowing cold soothing his heated face, whether or not Sam had crossed the big, scary line between “never” and “maybe” in regard to his love life had nothing to do with whether or not Carly was the woman he’d crossed that line for. Even if—and here’s the part he hadn’t gone into with Joe, nor was he likely to, with Joe or anybody else—Sam’s kids weren’t an issue.
Swept Away Page 9
