Sweet Return
Page 1
Praise for the Novels
of Anna Jeffrey
Salvation, Texas
“Anna Jeffrey continues to demonstrate her spectacular storytelling talents…. A first-class romantic suspense tale.”
—Affaire de Couer
“[E]xciting…Readers will enjoy Anna Jeffrey’s fine thriller.”
—Midwest Book Review
“It was a treat to read a good book set in Texas that really felt authentic. The people in this book were not just pretty folks in Wranglers and Ropers—they felt like they belonged there.”
—All About Romance
“A good solid read, with great characters and a fast-paced plot. Do yourself a favor and pick it up, and while you are at it, clear your plans for the evening!”
—Romance Reader at Heart
Sweet Water
“Jeffrey mixes just the right amounts of soft, sweet, and funny, making Agua Dulce hard to resist.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Sweet Water…is filled with wonderfully complex characters whose personalities are gradually revealed. There are no easy answers for any of them, but the ones they find are mostly happy and satisfyingly realistic. A pleasurable read!”
—Romantic Times
“A warm contemporary romance starring amiable lead protagonists and a town of eccentrics who meddle, matchmake, and mother the stars…. Fans will enjoy this slice of life in West Texas.”
—The Best Reviews
“Refreshing, appealing, and authentically romantic…Moving and sensual, Sweet Water is not soon forgotten.”
—Michelle Buonfiglio, Romance: B(u)y the Book
“Sweet Water is her best yet! Sexy, tender…romantic doesn’t begin to describe how wonderful this story is.”
—Romance Junkies
The Love of a Lawman
“Real characters come to life in this heart-wrenching tale littered with imperfect characters readers come to love and root for.”
—Rendezvous
“Engaging…The story line is loaded with action and the cast is a strong ensemble…a warm romantic tale.”
—The Best Reviews
“If you like well-written, character-driven romances…with engaging characters and lots of internal conflict, I highly recommend The Love of a Lawman.”
—Romance Reviews Today
The Love of a Stranger
“Delicious…a riveting read.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Fun…a delightful, solid novel.”
—Midwest Book Review
The Love of a Cowboy
“This book is on fire! Intense, romantic, and fiercely tender…an authentic and powerful love story.”
—Joan Johnston, New York Times bestselling author of The Cowboy
“Anna Jeffrey delivers a big, bold, and passionate story of second chances and starting over. Curl up and enjoy!”
—Susan Wiggs, New York Times bestselling author
“The Love of a Cowboy is a truly remarkable debut from a writer who is bound for superstardom!”
—Katherine Sutcliffe, USA Today bestselling author
“Anna Jeffrey’s debut novel, The Love of a Cowboy, is a welcome rarity in contemporary romance because its hero and heroine are kept apart by real obstacles…. Jeffrey writes a straightforward narrative and moves her plot along nicely. Dahlia and Luke are fully developed characters who’ll have you wincing over their hurts and sharing their joys.”
—Romantic Times
“One of the most satisfying endings that I’ve read lately. This one is a keeper—a book I’d read again. Anna Jeffrey has penned a passionate story of unconditional love and second chances. I highly recommend this book because I couldn’t put it down.”
—Romance Fiction Guide
ALSO BY ANNA JEFFREY
Salvation, Texas
Sweet Water
The Love of a Lawman
The Love of a Stranger
The Love of a Cowboy
Sweet Return
Anna Jeffrey
SIGNET ECLIPSE
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Signet Eclipse, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Jeffery McClanahan, 2007
All rights reserved
SIGNET ECLIPSE and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 1-4295-7902-1
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
As always, this is for my biggest fans—my husband,
George, and my daughter, Adrienne
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A special thanks to my neighbor, a retired oilman, for advising me on oil well drilling. Though I grew up in the West Texas oil patch, I’ve been away from it for many years and he helped refresh my memory.
Thanks also to hardworking, egg-laying hens everywhere. We really do take those birds for granted.
Chapter 1
Saturday, 1 a.m.
The headlights of Joanna Walsh’s pickup cast two wide fans of gold over a highway so da
rk it looked like black water. She had met only two cars since leaving the city limits of Hatlow, Texas. She saw just one other vestige of civilization. It showed in the form of occasional narrow columns of white lights from distant drilling rigs spearing the black sky like javelins.
Still half an hour from Lubbock, she pressed the accelerator more firmly—eighty, eighty-five, ninety…
Beside her, swallowed up by an old brown barn coat, Clova Cherry, her friend of thirteen years, huddled in the passenger seat. “I asked ’em if he’s gonna make it,” she said, “but they didn’t give me no answer. I don’t know what I’ll do if he don’t make it.”
The “he” was Clova’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Lane. Joanna heard the quaver in the older woman’s voice, heard the fear, not just for Lane’s well-being, but for her very future.
The phone call from Lubbock Memorial Hospital had come to Clova an hour earlier. Life Flight had choppered Lane to the hospital after EMTs pulled him from his pickup truck, which was found overturned in a ditch beside the highway that ran between Hatlow and Lovington, New Mexico. Clova, in turn, had awakened Joanna from a sound sleep and asked that she drive her the seventy-five miles from Hatlow to Lubbock. As one of the few friends Clova had, Joanna wouldn’t have dreamed of saying no.
“He’ll make it,” Joanna said with confidence she didn’t feel. She knew of too many times Hatlow citizens had been killed on the desolate Wacker County highways. Too often, the isolation of the locale and the monotony of an unremarkable, arrow-straight highway made drivers assume exceeding the speed limit was safe. On that thought, Joanna lifted her right foot and dropped her speed back to eighty. “Maybe he’s just got a few broken bones.”
“I’m prayin’ for that. God knows he’s had ’em before.”
True enough, Joanna thought. Tonight’s wreck wasn’t Lane Cherry’s first or even his second. Whatever his injuries were, they weren’t his first, either. From his vehicular mishaps to his years of bronc and bull riding in rodeos, he boasted a host of trophy scars and pinned bones.
Clova said nothing else and Joanna was glad. At eighty miles an hour, she had to concentrate on not wrecking her own pickup.
At last they reached the outskirts of Lubbock. She well knew the location of Lubbock Memorial. Every Hatlow citizen who suffered serious injury or illness sooner or later found him-or herself at the regional medical facility. She made her way there over empty streets. With the exception of a few college kids, Lubbock citizens weren’t out cruising at this hour.
Once they were in front of the reception desk inside the hospital’s expansive modern entry, an aide hustled them to the basement, into a chilled, poorly lit waiting room outside the surgery suite. A nurse reported that Lane had been in surgery an hour and assured them someone would speak to them soon.
Joanna and Clova were the only people present in the stark waiting room. Clova wilted onto the edge of the seat of a beige armchair, the worry in her brown eyes almost palpable. She didn’t look well in general. Her skin had a pallor and dark crescents showed under her eyes. She had teetered on the verge of breaking down for most of the trip from Hatlow.
“Looks like we could be here a while,” Joanna said. “There must be a coffee machine or something around here somewhere. I’ll get you—”
“Thanks, hon, but I don’t need nothin’.” Clova broke into a hard, raspy cough. It had been with her for weeks. It sounded like a smoker’s cough, but Clova didn’t smoke and never had, as far as Joanna knew. Recovered, Clova inhaled a great breath and let it out, her eyes vacant and seemingly focused on nothing. Joanna couldn’t guess what she might be thinking.
She sank into an armchair beside her friend, finally acknowledging the chill in the large room. The decor—beige tile floor, square furniture, abstract paintings of multicolored squares hanging on the walls—did nothing to add warmth to what felt like a subzero temperature. As she scanned their surroundings, she thought of how the sharp edges and hard, cold surfaces were so much like Clova Parker Cherry’s life.
Joanna began to shiver. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. In such a hurry when she threw on her clothes and left her house, she hadn’t thought of a jacket or a sweater. She picked up her purse and stood up. “I’m freezing. I’m going to find something hot to drink.”
Still wired from driving eighty to ninety miles an hour most of the trip from Hatlow, she had to move around. She hung her purse on her shoulder and walked out of the waiting room into a vacant hallway. A distance up the tiled corridor, she saw a pink neon sign pointing to a snack bar. There she found two pots of coffee simmering on hot plates, but no one manning the cash register. On the Formica pay-out counter sat a cardboard box with a slot in the top and a crude, hand-printed sign requesting the customers use the honor system.
She dug a couple of singles from her purse and stuffed them into the slotted box. She poured coffee into two Styrofoam cups, her weary mind wandering to why she had just raced up a lonely highway in the middle of the night after working a fifteen-hour day. Oh, she knew the answer well enough. Either her mother or her sister, or both, reminded her daily of her penchant for worrying about and taking on someone else’s problems at the expense of solving her own. Fretting over a friend’s troubles was one of her great weaknesses. With such a reputation to live up to, how could she not be doing exactly what she was doing now?
She carried the two cups to a waist-high counter and sprinkled a packet of Sweet’N Low and poured two packets of artificial cream into one. She didn’t really like coffee but could tolerate it if she changed the flavor enough. She desired it tonight because it was hot and she was still bleary-eyed from lack of sleep.
As she stirred the coffee, she began to worry about whether Lane Cherry would come out of this alive or if he might be unable to work for some long period of time, and how either of those outcomes would impact the old Parker ranch. Clova had been struggling to hang on to it ever since Joanna had known her. Lane was more or less the manager. When he was sober and at home, that is.
As she returned to the waiting room with the two cups of coffee, Joanna remembered Clova’s other son, who lived in California. His name was Dalton and he was roughly the same age as Joanna’s older sister. In high school, Lanita had dated him once or twice. Joanna knew he was a photographer whose work had been published in big, expensive-looking books. She had seen them stacked on the coffee table and the end tables in Clova’s living room. But that was the extent of her knowledge about him. As many times as she had visited Clova’s home, she had thumbed through those books only rarely.
She handed Clova the cup of hot black coffee. “I brought you some just in case you change your mind.”
Clova gave her a wan smile and took the cup. “Thanks, hon.”
Joanna seated herself beside the older woman again, resting her elbows on the chair arms and looking at her across her shoulder. “I was just thinking. Lane could be laid up a while. Why don’t you call Dalton and tell him you need help. Maybe he could come to the ranch and stay a few days. Or even a few weeks.”
Clova drew herself ever deeper into her coat, sniffed and shook her head. “No use talkin’ ’bout Dalton. Or tryin’ to talk to him. He ain’t never home. He don’t care nothin’ ’bout us, anyway, Joanna. And I don’t blame him. Back when it mattered, we didn’t act like we cared much about him.”
Joanna didn’t know what she meant by that. Maybe it had something to do with what everyone in Hatlow said about Dalton being mistreated by his stepfather and, indirectly, by his mother. Hatlow was a place where few “secrets” were secret. She refused to believe Clova had ever mistreated anyone, especially one of her children. Later she might ask her about it, but not tonight.
“I know you need to get your cattle to the sale. I think Harvey McAdoo’s kid will be home another couple of weeks before he goes back to school. He can probably help you out. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind earning a little extra money.”
“Lord God, Joanna, I ain’t sure I could pay him. L
ane ain’t got any hospital insurance, you know. No telling what this bill’s gonna cost.” She closed her eyes and rubbed a furrowed brow with her fingertips.
At the hopelessness of the woman’s situation, Joanna released a sigh and stared at the tan liquid in her own cup. Her head had begun to ache. Her eyes felt hot and gritty, as if she had spent the day in a sandstorm. At this moment, problem solving didn’t rate high on her list of priorities. She was worn out.
And dammit, she was freezing to the point of shivering. Didn’t anyone know how to turn off the air-conditioning in this place? Cold-enough-to-freeze-fire might be fine in the daytime when the outside temperature climbed to a hundred, but at two a.m., after it had dropped forty degrees, it was cold. She set her coffee on the table beside her chair and rubbed her palms up and down her arms for warmth.
Despite knowing she couldn’t add one more chore to her own to-do list, she said, “I can help you with some chores when I come out to tend the hens and gather the eggs.”
Somehow she would find the time.
Before more could be said, a woman dressed in blue scrubs bustled in and quickstepped to a desk at the end of the room. A highway patrolman from Texas’s Department of Public Safety followed her and waited while she opened drawers, brought out papers and attached them to a clipboard. The two talked in low tones. Joanna strained her ears but could make out only snippets of their conversation. The words that came to her in capital letters were “blood alcohol test.” Oh, hell.
Joanna had feared Lane was drunk. In recent months, he had spent a lot of his time in that state. She glanced at Clova, who had to have heard the same words but appeared to be unaffected.
Joanna had seen her close her mind to a problem related to Lane before. Clova Cherry was a tough, strong woman in many ways. Somehow, in the face of punishing obstacles and monumental odds stacked against her, she had held together the cattle ranch she inherited from her family. But Joanna had been acquainted with her long enough to know she wasn’t strong emotionally.