Strawberry Hill

by Catherine Anderson

Not wishing to think about her sex life, or the lack thereof, she searched for something to say to her chauffeur. “So, how long have you worked for my uncle?” she asked.

  No answer. She suspected that he’d felt the vibration of her voice against his chest, but for whatever reason, he didn’t wish to engage. That suited her just fine. The last thing she needed was to get involved with a cowboy who had his name engraved on the back of his belt so he could remember who he was when he put his pants on in the morning. Did he have his name on his belt? She hadn’t thought to check. She’d been too busy admiring his butt.

  Okay, fine. She found him attractive. But that was purely aesthetical appreciation, not a serious desire to get to know him better. She knew his kind. No ambition to own a ranch of his own. Content to have only three pairs of Wrangler jeans, two pairs of boots, a few shirts, a horse, and a saddle. By his own admission, he had few bills. He probably drove a battered old pickup with only liability insurance on it. If he thought about his future, which she doubted, he probably pictured himself hiring on at another ranch after Slade Wilder retired. Or maybe he hoped that her uncle would start to think of him as the son he’d never had and leave the place to him. That would happen over Erin’s dead body. Things at work would settle down. She’d find the time to go out to her uncle’s place. Maybe work with him. If she hated the ranch, fine. But if she loved it, as her uncle had once hoped she might, she sure wasn’t going to stand aside while Wyatt Fitzgerald stole her birthright.

  * * *

  • • •

  Wyatt felt an immeasurable sense of relief mixed with anxiety when he was finally able to leave Deputy De Laney at the Strawberry Hill trailhead. Her horse had been waiting there, just as Wyatt had predicted, and he’d made fast work of getting the gelding loaded into the trailer. Then he’d made even faster work of getting out of there. Everything about the woman made him uneasy. Extremely so, and what bothered him most was that he couldn’t figure out why. He only knew that Erin De Laney sent out mixed signals, and he’d found it nearly impossible to get a read on her. That rarely happened to him.

  Being deaf had forced Wyatt to sharpen his other four senses and perfect them to a point that he had what others considered to be an uncanny ability to understand both people and animals. Some individuals who watched him interact with a terrified or difficult horse grew convinced that he was telepathic, because he appeared to communicate his thoughts to an equine without words or gestures. And, in truth, he did, but he possessed no superhuman power. It was a learned ability. Some kids developed incredible balance by walking on logs and later became champion gymnasts. Others became gifted musicians simply because they had a good ear and practiced hour after hour to perfect their talent. For Wyatt, honing what he thought of as a fifth sense to compensate for the one he’d lost in utero hadn’t been a choice. He’d been forced to practice those skills every waking moment. If asked to explain how he had accomplished what he had, he’d be at a loss, and yet it was actually so simple it needed no explanation.

  As a young child, he’d been expected to feed, water, and clean up after the horses, so he’d been within striking distance of them every day. Except for being adept at American Sign Language, he’d been unable to talk yet, so he’d found other ways to let horses know what he wanted them to do. He’d also learned to sense their presence, because they were large and sometimes unpredictable creatures, which put him in constant peril. His mother had heatedly objected to putting her deaf child in harm’s way, but Wyatt’s grandfather had overruled his daughter-in-law’s wishes by insisting that Wyatt would learn to compensate for his handicap only if he was forced to do so. Looking back, Wyatt was glad of his grandfather’s wisdom, because he had learned. It hadn’t been easy, and he’d been scared more times than not, but he’d learned. By the age of ten, he’d developed the ability to feel something or someone staring at him and could sense the nearness of another being. He couldn’t pinpoint how he had cultivated that ability. He only knew he had. It was an all-over feeling that made his skin tingle and his hair stand on end. A different scent would flood into his nostrils. A trill of alarm would electrify his nerve endings. In short, he didn’t hear the world around him; he’d learned to feel it. And he had come to depend on that ability as surely as others counted on their ears.

  Yet Erin De Laney, while beside herself with anger, had approached him from behind and gotten close enough to touch him without him sensing she was there. The realization had rattled him then and still upset him now. If a bear or a cougar had gotten that close, he’d be either dead or seriously injured. His fifth sense—or what he’d come to think of as his fifth sense—had come to him only with hard work and years of practice. He needed it. For him, it was crucial to survival. And now he was no longer certain he could trust in it.

  What was it about Erin De Laney that was different from every other person and animal? Not even Kennedy, his beloved younger brother, could walk up behind Wyatt without setting off Wyatt’s alarms. Yet that woman had. Weird thoughts had been circling in Wyatt’s mind ever since. Was it some kind of sign that Erin was somebody special and would become an important individual in his life?

  God help me. He didn’t even like the woman. In all fairness, he’d disliked her before he ever met her, so maybe he hadn’t given her a fair chance. But even when he tried to cut her some slack, he couldn’t. Slade Wilder was a good man, and he deserved a niece who cared about him. Wyatt didn’t expect Erin to fall in love with the ranch or even pretend she did. Every person had his or her own path to walk in life, and horses and cows might never fit into Erin’s vision of her future. But this wasn’t about only the ranch and who would run it one day. It was about a man who faced the winter of his life and had no family—unless one counted a sister who refused to come see him and a niece who couldn’t be bothered. The least Erin could do was carve out one hour a week for her uncle. Maybe her story about working long hours was true. Maybe, as low man on the totem pole at the sheriff’s department, she got all the emergency calls and rarely had time off. But she surely got some downtime, and when she did, a certain amount of it should be slotted for visits with Slade.

  In Wyatt’s opinion, she’d failed miserably to do that. And no matter how nice she might seem otherwise, he’d never be able to overlook it. Actions spoke louder than words. If she cared about her uncle, she didn’t care enough, and that reflected badly on her. Slade had a heart of gold, which was apparent in his ranching practices. Wyatt had grown up around ranchers, and a substantial percentage of them grew callous toward animals over time. For some, it was undoubtedly a result of starting out with a tender heart that got in the way of their ability to do what had to be done. Sometimes a person had to take an emotional step back, and for some, that step distanced them so much from feeling compassion that they never regained the ability to care. Slade had never done that, and Wyatt deeply admired him for it. He supplied beef to the marketplace. The steers he raised from calves to adulthood were destined from the moment they were born to become a steak on someone’s plate. Yet he still cared for them in a personal way, giving them a scratch behind the ears when he could spare the time and never allowing a hired hand to mistreat them. Any man on Slade’s payroll who stepped over the line was terminated without notice. Slade wouldn’t tolerate cruelty and told every new hire exactly where he stood on that issue.

  How a man like Slade Wilder had never found a woman who loved him was a mystery to Wyatt. The older man had spoken a few times of a gal he referred to as the love of his life, but he’d never gone into detail. Wyatt’s impression was that Slade had been quite young at the time, and now so many years had passed that the girl had become little more than a fond memory. What had happened to ruin the relationship? Where was she now? Slade had been born on the Wilder Ranch. He would be an easy person to find, given that he’d always been based here. Maybe she was married and couldn’t reach out to him.

  Wyatt patted Shanghai on the shoulder an
d sighed. Now that Slade’s niece was living in Mystic Creek, he had to hope that Erin’s presence wouldn’t cause her uncle further emotional pain.

  Chapter Three

  Holding the photograph by one corner between thumb and forefinger, Vickie Brown stared down at the baby picture of her firstborn son. A musty odor drifted up from the box of keepsakes she’d taken from her closet and now sat beside her on the bed, reminding her how old the snapshot was and how ancient that made her. She’d be sixty-three in December, and suddenly her life seemed to have rushed past her. When had she become someone who’d borrowed against her house to get her hands on money, then lost her job due to an economic downturn, and now had a mortgage payment she couldn’t afford? An old lady who couldn’t get hired on at any decent restaurant within a reasonable driving distance along the Oregon coast? An old lady who might be forced to work for minimum wage in order to survive, like an inexperienced line cook?

  And what the hell was going on in her brain that had her thinking about Slade Wilder and wishing there was still a chance for them to be together again as a couple? Over forty-one years had passed since she’d last clapped eyes on the man. Brody, the result of their relationship, was going to celebrate his forty-second birthday next May. It was imbecilic of her to go waltzing down memory lane. Maybe she had early-onset dementia. Only was it even early at her age? The thought terrified Vickie. Her memory definitely wasn’t as sharp as it had once been. How many times a day did she walk into a room to do something and then couldn’t remember why she was even there? And looking frantically for her cell phone when she was talking to someone on it. She’d done that, too.

  Only her yearning to remember those days with Slade still burned within her. Needing to go back in time, she dug deeper to find images taken in her late teens and early twenties, which she hadn’t looked at in years. Her hand came up filled with slippery, four-by-six photos, some black-and-white, others in color, and as if guided upward by her aching heart, a likeness of Slade Wilder sat at the top. Her stomach knotted, and her throat went tight. He’d been so handsome. Tall, well muscled, and wearing that teasing grin that had always made her knees feel weak, he stood beneath a ponderosa pine. Sunshine filtered down through its boughs to surround him with a nimbus of light. Skin burnished by exposure to the elements. Shoulders and arms strengthened by hard work. He wore the red shirt she’d given him for his twentieth birthday. At his waist, a championship rodeo buckle flashed silver and gold. With a quivering finger, she traced his outline, and remembered how wonderful it had been to be held in his arms. She’d loved him so much.

  She had fooled herself into believing her feelings for him were gone, but the rush of excitement that she’d felt when she saw his Craigslist ad for a camp cook had brought it all back. She’d loved him practically all her life, and she guessed she always would. She could mentally berate herself for being an idiot, but her foolish heart wouldn’t listen to reason. She lifted that picture from the pile on her palm, let the others slide off into the box, and retrieved the likeness of Brody to hold both images side by side. And there it was, an astounding resemblance that Slade couldn’t have ignored. But, for whatever reason, he had refused to acknowledge that she’d borne him a son.

  As always, anger surged through Vickie’s veins with such force that every beat of her heart thrummed in her ears. And then the tears came, filling her eyes and blurring her vision so that the two photographs swam together. She felt her body begin to tremble. The salty wetness that spilled over her lashes and trickled down her cheeks burned her skin and made her nose itch.

  She felt so tired. So awfully, horribly exhausted. She couldn’t walk back into Slade’s life without warning after all these years. She must have gone momentarily crazy to even toy with the idea.

  “Mom? What are you doing? You don’t have time to look at keepsakes! You’re supposed to be packing your duffel bag and making a list of things we need to go buy.”

  Vickie jerked so violently that she almost tipped over the box. She tossed the picture back into the cardboard container and glanced up, hoping that the tears on her face weren’t obvious. No such luck. Her daughter’s green eyes, so very like Vickie’s own, widened with dismay. After studying Vickie for a moment, Nancy pushed a hank of curly, brilliantly auburn hair from her cheek and took a slow step toward the bed.

  “What’s wrong? Why are you crying? I thought you were excited about the job.”

  Excited. If Vickie took that job as a camp cook, she would have to face her past, and nothing about that would be easy or pleasant. She wanted to explain that to her daughter, only when she considered the magnitude of the secret she’d kept for the last forty-one years, she could think of no excuses that would absolve her. She’d lied to her oldest child—to all three of her children—and life didn’t come with an eraser. A person had to live with her mistakes, and oh, how she regretted this particular one.

  Please don’t look in that box, Vickie thought. She had no idea if the photo of Slade had landed with the face up or down, and if she dared to check, Nancy’s attention would be drawn to it. “I’m, uh, reconsidering my decision to take the job in central Oregon,” Vickie settled for saying. It had seemed like fate earlier that morning when she’d seen Slade Wilder named as the outfitter who needed a camp cook in the Mystic Creek, Oregon, area. She’d been unable to shake the feeling that it was divine intervention, with God orchestrating things so she would finally gather the courage to face the man who had almost destroyed her. “I think I’ll be happier working for the fellow out of Ontario.”

  Nancy sat on the bed. “Mom, Ontario is so much farther away! Plus it has a population of only about twelve thousand, and that man guides hunts clear across the Oregon state line in Idaho.”

  Vickie battled her urge to grab the box flaps and fold them over. Nancy was too observant for anything like that to get past her. “Nevertheless, I’ve decided against the Mystic Creek job.”

  “I don’t get it. Thirty minutes ago, you couldn’t wait to get packed and hit the road. Now you’ve put on the brakes.” Nancy pushed at her hair again. Shoulder-length strands of it had come loose from the ponytail and sprung out around her heart-shaped face like coppery Christmas ribbons that had been curled on the sharp edge of a scissor blade. She glanced into the box, stared blankly for a moment, and then smiled. “What a great picture of Brody! That’s one I’ve never seen.” She reached for the snapshot. Vickie clenched her hands into fists to stop herself from grabbing her daughter’s wrist. “Hot damn, he was handsome back then.” She grimaced. “God, I’m getting old. He probably looks at me and sees the mileage on me, too.” She lifted the image and continued to admire it with a wistful expression. “So young and ready to take on the world. It’s sad that things have turned out so badly for him.”

  Vickie wanted to slap the photo from her daughter’s hand. Brody bore a marked resemblance to Slade, no question about it, but there were subtle differences, and Nancy would notice them if she continued to study it. The younger woman sighed and started to put the likeness back in the box, only her gaze snagged on something and her forehead creased in a frown.

  “Wait a minute. This isn’t Brody. This guy’s wearing a prize buckle. Brody won a few himself, but not until he was older than this.” She peered at the silver and gold design. “It’s for roping, I think.” Filled with bewilderment, her gaze shot to Vickie’s. “Who is this man, Mom? He has to be a relative to look so much like Brody, but I don’t remember ever seeing him.”

  Vickie thought quickly. “My uncle, Mama’s brother. He, um . . . he was killed in Vietnam. No, I’m sorry. I’m getting my wars confused. It must have been World War Two—or maybe the Korean conflict.”

  “Oh, how sad!” Nancy stared at the image. “I didn’t think people had cameras that took color pictures way back then.”

  “Color photography existed, but it was very expensive, so most people’s cameras used black-and-white film. I had th
at snapshot tinted. A gift for Grandma.” Vickie remembered lecturing her kids about the pitfalls of lying. Once you told one untruth, you found yourself lying again and again to back up your story. Boy, had she ever been right about that. “She thought the world of him.”

  Nancy’s frown deepened. “If it’s a special gift, why doesn’t she still have it?”

  Oh, how Vickie hated this. For one, she was a lousy liar, and for another, it filled her with guilt to be untruthful with her daughter. “Seeing it made her sad. She gave it back to me and asked me to keep it safe.”

  “Oh, how awful. She’s never mentioned losing her brother to me. What was his name?”

  Vickie had started to sweat. “She never talks about him. Hasn’t in years. I can’t really remember now. Ben? Glen, maybe. Something like that.” She didn’t dare say Slade, because they’d both been on the computer earlier, reading about Slade Wilder and his outfitting business. “I don’t bring it up anymore. Remembering his death upsets her, and I worry about her heart.” Stop, Vickie. You’re chattering. Saying more than necessary. Shut up while you’re ahead. “If she thinks of him, she no longer brings it up.”

  “I thought Grandma grew up in Portland and was such a greenhorn when Grandpa took her to his farm that she didn’t know the difference between a bull, a cow, or a steer. But her brother was a champion roper?”

  Vickie laughed, a forced, shrill twitter. “Yes, well. Her brother was older and left the city to find work. He ended up at a ranch. Got interested in rodeo competition. Then he joined the service when the war broke out.”

  “Sad,” Nancy mused as she put the snapshot back. “So young, with his whole life ahead of him, and it was over just that fast.” She sighed, and Vickie followed suit. “You have to show Brody that picture, though. When you’re not around, he jokes that his father must have been a mailman. Once he sees that, he’ll know where he got his looks. The resemblance is uncanny. For a minute, I actually thought it was my brother!”