Harlequin Romance July 2013 Bundle: A Cowboy To Come Home ToHow to Melt a Frozen HeartThe Cattleman's Ready-Made FamilyRancher to the Rescue

by Donna Alward

  “You know everybody makes mistakes. Your aunt Nora when she got engaged to a jerk.”

  Her heart filled with the most unreasonable gratitude that someone saw Vance’s defection as a statement about him, not about her.

  “He was a jerk,” Luke said. “A sanctimonious, know-it-all, stuck-up jerk.”

  Nora’s mouth fell open. First of all, she’d had no idea Luke’s dislike of Vance had run so deep. Second, she had no idea that he could use a word like sanctimonious correctly.

  “She should have asked Rover,” Brendan deadpanned, and then he and Luke cracked up. Brendan must have caught her disapproving expression, because he sobered.

  “So, everybody makes mistakes,” he said. “When you took that money from Deedee, it was a mistake. What matters is whether you choose to grow from them or not.”

  “What kind of mistakes have you ever made?” Luke challenged, not laughing anymore. Nora could tell he wanted to believe there was hope that a mistake could turn out okay, and was afraid to believe at the very same time.

  Which she understood perfectly, of course.

  Brendan hesitated. He tossed his cards down on the table. For a moment, it looked as if he wasn’t going to say anything at all.

  Then, his voice so soft she felt herself straining to hear it, he said, “My wife died because of a terrible mistake I made. She was carrying our baby.”

  Nora laid her hand on his, almost unbearably grateful that Brendan had seen how great Luke’s need was. And possibly hers. That he had overcome so tremendous an inner obstacle and given something of himself to both of them confirmed that her instincts had been right, after all.

  There was a common place between them.

  But it seemed to her that common place was the most frightening thing of all. It asked her to put aside her past injuries and her petty fears. It asked her to think less about protecting herself and more about reaching out to another human being.

  Reaching out to animals was easy. Human beings were far more complicated.

  She wasn’t ready. She ordered herself to withdraw her hand.

  And yet her hand, as if separate from her mind and linked to her soul, stayed right where it was.

  * * *

  Brendan could not believe he had said that to Nora and Luke. What if these were the words that broke open that dam of emotion within him?

  But no, the dam was safe. He had not cried then, and he would not cry now. Still, there was nothing he hated more than sympathy. He waited for her to say something that would make him regret confiding in them even more than he already did.

  But Nora said nothing at all. Instead, with a tenderness so exquisite if felt as if the dam of emotion was newly threatened, she laid her hand on top of his.

  For a moment he felt only the connection, her small hand covering part of his larger one, the softness of her palm against his toughened skin.

  But then he was stunned by the warmth that began to pour from her hand, some energy vibrating up his wrist into his arm. It felt as if his whole body was beginning to tingle.

  And suddenly, the world’s greatest cynic believed what he had only suspected until now.

  She could heal things.

  The light shining in her eyes almost made him believe she could heal the most impossible thing of all: a heart smashed to pieces.

  For a stunned second, he felt his throat close. But then he fought it.

  Because who would want that fixed? For what reason? So that it could be smashed again? So that a man could face his impotency over the caprice of life all over again?

  He jerked his hand out of hers, and she stiffened, guessing it, correctly, as rejection. Then she had the good sense to look relieved. She actually glared at her hand for a minute, as if it had mutinied and acted on its own accord.

  She turned rapidly from him, ran a hand over her eyes, winced when she touched the bump on her head.

  “I should get some footage of Charlie for Deedee and then go,” he said.

  Luke, looking pensive and solemn, went and got the cat.

  Nora was completely composed when she turned back to Brendan.

  “Thank you for telling us. I know it was hard for you. And yet he needed to hear it. He’s known you only a short time, but he looks up to you.”

  Brendan shrugged, withdrawing, uncomfortable.

  Luke came back with Charlie and set him on the counter.

  The cat gave a yowl of indignation and made for the edge, as if he fully planned to leap to the floor.

  Brendan stared. This was a cat that had barely been able to lift his head a few days ago. “What are you feeding him?”

  Luke made a quick grab and caught Charlie by the back of the neck. The cat hunkered down, resigned but unhappy.

  “There’s no cure for old age,” Nora told Brendan gently. “There’s nothing that stops life from unfolding in its natural order.”

  As Luke lifted his other hand so that both of them rested on the cat, Brendan was aware again of that vibration, of an energy he didn’t understand. It was almost as if the light in the room changed.

  The cat stopped struggling. It was as if Charlie had been tranquilized. He closed his eyes and a deep purr came from him.

  Luke jerked his hands away. He took the cat off the counter, set him on the floor, watched him scoot off. Uncaring that there would be no pictures tonight, he shoved both hands in his pockets. His face was white and his voice was brimming with anger.

  “Life’s natural order?” he spat out. “My mom was thirty-four. What’s natural about that? Oh, and Aunt Nora is a healer, all right. Ask anyone. My mom always talked about my auntie Kookie, how her room was filled with mice and birds and cats and dogs, and she could heal them all.”

  “Luke, that’s an exaggeration. I liked animals. I couldn’t—”

  But he cut her off. “I was here when they brought that dog in. It was dead.”

  “It wasn’t,” Nora said. “Obviously it wasn’t.”

  “And then she puts her hands on it, and poof, he’s alive and wagging his tail. And in three days he’s running around the yard, bringing me sticks to throw.

  “But when it really counts? When it’s cancer? Forget it! Who would want a gift like that, anyway? That’s why I don’t want to be like her! You can’t change anything that matters.”

  And then he spun on his heel and followed the cat, and Nora and Brendan stood in frozen silence as he thumped up the stairs.

  “How did he know Charlie has cancer?” Brendan asked.

  “He doesn’t,” Nora said too quickly, her troubled eyes on the empty doorway her nephew had gone through. “His mom—my sister—died of cancer. I’m sorry, I don’t think there’s anything more I can do for Charlie. You should take him home to Deedee. She can spend his last days with him.”

  Brendan could feel weariness like a dull ache in his bones.

  Not just because it was late, either.

  It was the weariness of it all.

  A boy who had lost everything and who already knew you could not change anything that really mattered. A woman who was trying desperately to help him through it, even though she had lost, too.

  Brendan realized he had actually been thinking that cat was getting better. Had been bringing Deedee pictures, instead of preparing her to face yet another loss.

  This was the truth he had been doing his best to outrun for two and a half years. It was just as Luke had said. When it really counted?

  A man was powerless.

  And there was no feeling in the world quite as bad as that one.

  Luke came back down the stairs. He looked as if he had been crying, and Brendan almost envied him those tears, the release they brought from the inner storm.

  The boy’s face was white and strained with the m
anful effort of trying not to let everything he was feeling show. He had Charlie tucked under his arm, an unwilling football.

  “I’m going to fix him! And I’m going to pay you back your money, too!” Luke stomped back up the stairs.

  Nora bit her lip, sent Brendan an imploring look.

  He shrugged. He wanted to be a dyed-in-the-wool cynic, but the past few days had challenged that. The aunt had something. He had felt it when she’d touched his arm.

  And Luke had something, too. That cat was acting better, even if he wasn’t actually getting better.

  Though that something that Nora and Luke had—that gift with things wounded—was not necessarily what they needed.

  Despite the shrug, he knew his indifference was pretended. Caring had crept up on him.

  Brendan recognized their lives were a web he could get tangled in.

  Was already tangled in, whether he wanted to be or not. And he didn’t want it. He’d spent a long time locked in his lonely place, avoiding entanglement.

  He walked out the door, refusing to look back at Nora. Free of the enchantment of her house, walking through the warmth of the early summer evening to his car, Brendan Grant vowed to himself he wasn’t coming back here. Not until it was time to pick up Charlie.

  Dead or alive.

  * * *

  Nora loved the barn. It had taken a dozen volunteers and a hundred man-hours to make the falling-down old structure into an animal shelter, but now it was perfect. She was in the small-animal section, two rows of roomy cages facing a sparkling clean center aisle.

  After a night like last night, she needed the peace she felt working alone here. She had a rock-and-roll station blasting, music from the fifties. It was partly to keep her moving through the exhaustion after twenty-four hours of being woken every hour on the hour. It was partly a nice distraction from her whirling thoughts.

  But the animals loved music. Humming along, she reached inside the rabbit cage, picked up a droopy-eared bunny she had named Valentine, and tucked him into her bosom.

  He wriggled against her, snuggling deeper.

  “You want to dance, sweetheart?”

  “Sure.”

  She whirled. Brendan was standing there, watching her. The rabbit must have taken the sudden hard beating of her heart as a warning of imminent danger, because he scrambled out of her arms, over her shoulder and down her back. He hit the floor running.

  Brendan reached behind him and closed the door to prevent bunny escape, then turned back to her.

  How unfair that he looked even better in the pure afternoon sunshine streaming through the windows high up the walls than he had looked last night.

  He must have come from work. He had on a white shirt and gray pants. A tie was loosely knotted at his throat. He looked handsome and sure of himself, a model for GQ, only more real.

  And she still had a lump the size of a baseball on her forehead, and was wearing a charming blue smock of the one-size-fits-all variety that swam around her.

  “I—I haven’t seen you for a few days,” she stammered. She hoped there was nothing in her voice that revealed how she had waited. And watched.

  And hated herself for both.

  “Busy at work,” he said.

  “What are you doing here now?”

  “Deedee insisted. Luke’s been sending her pictures, but she had to come see for herself.”

  Nora had no idea Luke had been sending on pictures of the cat. She probably would have asked him to stop, if she knew. What did they all think was going to happen?

  “Yesterday he sent a video of that old cat playing with a ball.”

  She looked closely at Brendan. “Please tell me you don’t believe that animal is going to get better?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what to believe, Nora. The thing is, I’m getting better. And I never believed that would happen.”

  “What do you mean, better?” she whispered.

  He rolled his shoulders. “I’ve been in total darkness. I can feel the light trying to get through. There are cracks in the wall and light is seeping in, and every time I patch one crack, another one appears.”

  It felt as if she couldn’t breathe. As if she was going to cry. It felt as if she could run to him and put her arms around him and whisper him home.

  To her.

  “But the walls have become who I am, so when they crumble, will I crumble, too?”

  “No,” she whispered. “You won’t.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The feelings were too strong. To hide how totally vulnerable she felt, Nora got down on her hands and knees and looked under a set of cages. Valentine stared back at her.

  And then Brendan was on the floor beside her. His scent, clean and masculine, overrode every other smell in the building. It was not lightening the mood, having him so near, though he, too, seemed to want to back off from the intensity of the previous moment.

  “I think he stuck his tongue out at me,” he said.

  “Like life,” she said. “When you most want control, it will stick its tongue out at you.”

  “Oh boy,” Brendan muttered, “I can see it coming now. Ask Valentine.”

  She laughed and he smiled.

  “There he is.” He reached under the row of cages; his shoulder brushed hers; Valentine hopped away.

  Nora shot back before she did something really dumb, something she would regret forever, and crawled along the floor. “Valentine,” she crooned, “come here.”

  “I dropped Deedee off at the house. Luke said you were down here.”

  Did that mean Brendan wanted to see her? She glanced sideways at him, just as he shoved himself under the bank of cages.

  “You’re ruining your clothes,” she said.

  He ignored her. “I’m being outsmarted by a rabbit.”

  Valentine hopped from underneath and took off down the row.

  Brendan crawled out, dusted himself off, stood up. “Can’t you call him back with your energy?”

  She glanced at him, annoyed at the barb, and then saw the little smile playing across his face. He was teasing her. Something dangerous rippled down her spine.

  The awareness of him shivered more intensely around her. It was nice to be teased by him.

  For a moment, she was going to fight it. The intensity, the subtle invitation to bring him into the light.

  And then she found she couldn’t. By his own admission he had been in darkness. By his own admission he had come here to her.

  With an inner sigh of surrender, Nora decided to play. To be the one thing she never was. Totally herself. She had been so serious for so long. She could not resist the temptations of this moment.

  CHAPTER TEN

  NORA PLACED HER fingers on her temples, squinched her eyes shut tightly and hummed. “Uzzy, wuzzy, fuzzy bunny, let this poem call you home.”

  She opened one eye when she heard Brendan snicker. “Is it working?”

  “That is the worst spell I’ve ever heard.”

  “Oh,” she said, widening her eyes innocently. “Have you heard many?”

  “Thankfully, no.”

  “Why don’t you try?”

  He seemed to debate for a moment. Why did her heart begin to beat faster when he gave in to it, too? To the invitation of life not being so serious. A smile tugged at the corners of that sinful mouth.

  “How about a carrot instead of an incantation?” he suggested.

  “If he was starving, we might have a hope. As you know, since you’ve been doing it, he’s quite well fed. Still...” she went to the fridge at the end of the aisle, removed a bag and handed Brendan a carrot “...we can try. If it doesn’t work today, it might work by midweek.”

  They went back down the aisle, her on one
side, him on the other, peering under cages.

  “Now that Deedee’s feeling better, is she going to make a decision? Is she going to take Charlie home? Or to the vet?” Nora asked.

  “She has her own ideas, as always, none of which involve relieving you of Charlie. She seems to have come for a visit. Luke and she were in deep conversation when I left.”

  “Luke and Deedee? Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Hey! Here he is! Here bunny, bunny, bunny.” Brendan was down on his knees again, peering under a sink. As she watched, reluctantly enchanted by a man willing to wreck a thousand-dollar suit for a rabbit, he held out the carrot in the palm of his hand. Valentine edged toward him, he made a move to grab him and the bunny leaped sideways and hopped away.

  “He’s waving his tail at me. Like a middle finger. Wow. Even I can read his energy.”

  Nora giggled. Brendan turned and glared at her, but a smile lurked in his eyes. “Let’s see if he’ll fall for the bait again.”

  Really, she knew if they left the rabbit alone, he’d eventually get hungry and come out. But it was too fun trying to catch him with Brendan.

  Together they chased that bunny all over the barn, acting silly, making faces, doing voices, crawling under cages, and in and out and over obstacles. They called suggestions to each other, and whispered plans, as if he could overhear them, and they laughed at Valentine’s impudence.

  Finally, they had him.

  “Companies pay money for this,” Brendan said. “It’s called team building.”

  It occurred to her they had been a team. And it had felt good. Why was it every time she was with him something happened that made her feel the delicious if guilty pleasure of not being alone?

  Now she focused on him and the bunny. She could tell a lot about a person from how he handled an animal.

  For a moment Brendan looked as if he intended to hand Valentine to her.

  But then his expression softened, and he held the bunny firmly in the palm of his hand, his fingers tapered over the rib cage. He pulled him in close to his chest, stroking Valentine’s snubby little nose with one gentle fingertip.