by Helen Lacey
Cedar River, South Dakota, population three thousand and something, sat in the shadow of the Black Hills. Once, it had been a vibrant copper-and silver-mining community. The mines were all closed now, except for a couple that were part of the growing tourist industry. Tourists came through Cedar River on the way to Nebraska and to stay at one of the many dude ranches popping up, or at the luxurious O’Sullivan Hotel. The place was considered one of the best around, and Abby was proud to be a part of that success.
She’d worked at the hotel for a few years. After graduation, she’d scored a position as an apprentice chef at a small restaurant in Rapid City and a year later headed to Paris to study French cuisine for eighteen months. By then, she was already engaged to Tom Perkins, and he had happily accompanied her to Paris. They had spent an idyllic year and a half together in the city—studying, dreaming, seeing the sights. Abby flourished under the guidance of one of the most talented chefs in the city, and Tom had the opportunity to pursue his love of art and music.
When they returned to Cedar River, Abby began working part-time at one of the best restaurants in Rapid City, commuting back to town on the weekends while Tom took a position at the local hardware store. They made wedding plans and bought a house and settled into their life together, marrying two days after her twenty-first birthday.
Four years later, Tom passed away.
Seven months after that, T.J. was born.
And Abby had to make a life for herself and her son.
She’d considered leaving Cedar River many times...to start fresh, to avoid questions and pity and maybe speculation. But her grandmother loved the small town, and other than T.J., she was the only family Abby had to rely on. She supposed she could have moved to Florida to be close to her mother. But her mom had remarried and had her own life, and although she loved her mom and her stepfather was a nice man, Abby had very little in common with her only surviving parent.
So, she stayed in Cedar River.
And waited.
Always on edge. Never truly relaxed. Always wondering, always thinking, always knowing that someday, she would have to face the consequences of that one reckless and unforgettable afternoon.
And it was going to happen soon. She was sure of it.
Because Jake Culhane was back.
Just thinking about him made her insides quake.
She hadn’t seen him since two days after Tom’s funeral. Which suited her just fine. She didn’t want to see Jake. But she knew it was inevitable. Cedar River was a small town. At some point, their paths would cross. He’d been back a few weeks, since his brother’s accident, and Abby had deliberately kept a low profile, avoiding her usual routine, coming and going from work as discreetly as she could. She’d tried to stay away from the supermarket, the bank, the bakery—anywhere she thought he might show up. But of course, she still had to live her life, still had erands to run and things she had to do. She couldn’t hide forever.
Thankfully, none of the Culhanes regularly frequented the hotel eateries, as neither family liked the other very much. It wasn’t exactly a feud, but since the O’Sullivan and Culhane brothers had gone to the same high school, there was enough testosterone between them to cause a rift that was mainly borne out of a leftover football rivalry.
Abby headed for the staff parking area and within minutes was in her sedan driving from the hotel. She thought about dismissing her grandmother’s text message and then changed her mind. T.J. wanted pizza for dinner, and since it was Friday night, she relented and drove directly to JoJo’s Pizza Parlor. She scored a parking space outside and switched off the ignition. As always, the restaurant was busy, and she wished she’d called beforehand and placed her order.
Once she was inside, Abby walked toward the counter and waited behind a young couple placing a large order. She looked around, noticing how crowded the restaurant was. All the booth seats were occupied and most of the tables. A couple of women were sitting at the bar, and a few people were seated in the takeout area, clearly waiting for their orders. She fiddled with her car keys as she waited and scanned the restaurant again, catching a glimpse of a group in one of the booths. Four men. All tall and broad shouldered. She recognized the chief of police, Hank Culhane, immediately. And his twin, Joss. The two other men were darker haired. And then dread crawled over her skin when she recognized Jake Culhane’s all-too-familiar profile.
His military crew cut was unmissable. His shoulders were exactly as she remembered. His eyes, she knew, were brilliantly green and his jaw strong and uncompromising. He’d always been ridiculously attractive. Since high school. They’d dated for all of senior year, and Abby had been undeniably in love with him. Until he’d broken her heart. Of course, she knew his betrayal wasn’t deliberate. But Jake wanted a military career, and Abby had no intention of being the girlfriend—or the wife—of a soldier. She’d watched her own mother go down that path, and it wasn’t a life she wanted for herself. So, they broke up, Jake left town and Abby started dating Tom Perkins.
And then, as if on cue, his shoulders tightened, and he turned his head a fraction.
Goose bumps broke out over her skin, and she moved closer to the counter when the couple in front moved to the side, ready to give her order. She quickly selected what she wanted from the menu, paid for the pizza, stuffed the receipt in her purse and was about to head toward the waiting area when she heard an all-too-familiar voice behind her.
“Hello, Abby.”
She took a breath, pulled on every ounce of bravado she possessed and turned.
Up close, Jake Culhane was just as gorgeous as she remembered. Six feet two, broad shoulders, the most dazzling green eyes, clean-shaven jaw—he was the perfect picture of masculinity. He was still the most handsome man she’d ever known. The only man who could churn her up inside. The only man who ever made her lose her good sense and reason.
Her ex-boyfriend.
Tom’s best friend.
And the father of her son.
“Oh, hey, Jake,” she said as casually as she could. “I heard you were back. How’s Mitch?”
The whole town knew about the accident that had almost killed his older brother. Thankfully, Mitch had survived, but the event had been serious enough to drag Jake back to the town he hated. She had no idea why he was still hanging around. Jake’s visits had always been a few days here or there at the most. In between his tours in Iraq, he’d rarely returned. Now, as he was retired from the military, she had heard he owned some kind of high-tech security business. Not that she cared. She’d stopped caring about Jake a long time ago. But they had history.
And a son.
A child he didn’t know was his.
To everyone who knew her, T.J. was Tom’s child. Only her grandmother, her mom and her best friend, Renee, knew the truth. Renee lived in Denver, which was where Abby had gone once she’d discovered she was pregnant. She’d needed to clear her head, to grieve for the husband she had lost and work out the next phase in her life. She spent six months with her friend, including the two months after T.J.’s birth. Born nearly seven weeks premature, her son had fought a fierce battle to survive. He’d spent three weeks in the NICU before she could take him home. She returned to Cedar River with a healthy two-month-old baby, and no one questioned his paternity.
Except Tom’s parents.
They knew Tom wasn’t able to get her pregnant. After two years of trying to have a baby, tests had proven that she would need to pursue a sperm donor if they wanted to have a child. They were considering their options when Tom unexpectedly suffered a severe stroke. He pulled through and for three weeks Abby believed everything would be okay—until another stroke claimed his life.
“He’s fine,” she heard Jake say, barely able to hear his voice above the screeching going off in her head. “Getting better every day. How are you?”
It was polite conversation. Too polite. The last ti
me they had spoken, it had been heated and unpleasant. A morning-after conversation. A postmortem of the worst kind. Words she never wanted to hear again.
“Great. Never better. You?”
His eyes narrowed fractionally. “Fine. How’s your grandmother?”
Gran had always called Jake Abby’s quicksand. And she couldn’t disagree. When she was seventeen, she had been achingly in love with him. He had been her first real kiss, her first lover.
My last kiss. My last lover.
Her son’s face flashed in front of her eyes, and she willed the image away. She didn’t want to think about T.J. She didn’t want to make comparisons with the man standing in front of her. She didn’t want to acknowledge that her son’s eyes were exactly the same shade of green, or that they shared an identical birthmark, or that the tiny cleft in his chin was a shadow of the man whose DNA he shared.
Panic clawed at her skin, and she fought every impulse she possessed to run and not look back. And to pretend that nothing was going to change. That Jake would soon leave town and she could feel normal again.
Because it felt different.
Ever since she learned he was back, she’d been on edge. Because she knew what was coming—the truth she needed to tell. To Jake and to her son.
“Gran is her usual wonderful self,” she replied casually, and willed her food order to hurry up so she could make her getaway. “Still volunteering at the local veterans’ home. I hear you left the military?”
“My tour was up,” he replied. “It felt like the right time to hang up the combat boots.”
Abby didn’t want to think about what he’d seen and endured over the course of his tours in Iraq. Her own father had been killed in Desert Storm, and after watching her mother grieve for decades, Abby had been determined she would never get involved with a soldier. Instead, she’d married Tom—safe and dependable—exactly what her young heart had yearned for.
“Well, I’m happy you came back in one piece,” she said flippantly.
“I told you I would.”
His words had pinpoint accuracy. At eighteen, she’d made her feelings very clear. Terrified he would be injured, or worse, Abby had used his joining the army as an excuse to bail from their teenage romance. Jake had also been clear: he needed to enlist—it was all that mattered.
Not her.
Not them.
And Abby wasn’t naive enough to imagine that he’d changed. Jake didn’t have the reputation of a man who hung around. He’d left Cedar River without looking back. He’d left their relationship. And Abby had had every right to forge a new life for herself after he was gone. A life with Tom, because her husband had been a kind and considerate man who had loved her dearly. And he’d stayed by her side, fully supporting her decision to work in Cedar River when she could have had her pick of several of the finest restaurants on the West Coast after returning from Paris.
But Tom knew how important Cedar River was to Abby. Her grandmother had always called it home. Her father and grandfather were buried in the large cemetery at the edge of town. It was a town filled with memory and comfort and the hope for the future. The place where she wanted to raise her son.
But it was also Jake’s hometown.
And now that Jake was back, Abby had choices to make.
Tell him...
Don’t tell him...
Let him work it out for himself.
It wasn’t as though she’d announced to the world that T.J. was Tom’s son. She’d simply never been asked to explain why her child looked nothing like her auburn-haired husband. People made assumptions. And Abby was essentially a private person. Too private to be bandying around the details of her personal life.
But she also liked to think she was a truthful person. She was honest in every other aspect of her life. But not when it came to Jake. And now, since everything was different, the truth hovered on the edge of her tongue.
“Jake—” She said his name almost as though it pained her. “I think we should—”
“He’d want us to be friends, you know,” he said, cutting her off.
He. Tom. Abby knew how much her husband had liked the man in front of her. Tom had never failed to remind her what a great guy Jake was. About how Jake had stood up for him in high school, protected him from schoolyard bullies, because Tom was a small and sickly and quiet. While Jake was the motorcycle-riding bad boy. They were polar opposites...and yet, they had formed a solid friendship, grounded in trust and mutual respect.
But she knew her time was up. Jake would work it out.
Abby just needed to summon the courage to tell him first.
Chapter Two
“That looked...frosty.”
Jake was back at the booth right after Abby had collected her order and left the restaurant. And his brothers couldn’t wait to comment on the encounter.
It had been an uncomfortable interaction...although not exactly cold. They had too much history to act as though they were strangers to one another. Yet he’d felt the tension emanating from her. But damn, she was still so beautiful. Her brown hair still shone, her pale blue eyes were as mesmerizing as they’d been in high school. Back then, he’d been crazy for her. But it didn’t last. Abby freaked out the moment he said he was joining the army. She didn’t want to be a soldier’s girlfriend. Or wife. They broke up just after graduation.
Jake was already deep into his first boot camp when he’d received a short phone call from Tom, asking if he was okay with his dating Abby. Of course, he was far from okay with whole idea, but there was hardly anything he felt he could really do about it. They were adults. He and Abby were over. And Tom was an honorable guy. True, Jake was pissed for a while, but he got over it. The army, and the front line, were no place for a man haunted by the memory of a girl he’d once cared about. So he wished his friend luck and got on with his life.
And everything was okay for a long time. Until Tom died.
When Jake returned to Cedar River and, for a brief moment, he and Abby found solace in each other’s arms.
He shrugged and ignored his brother’s jibe. Joss was always the one to speak his mind. Jake had spent so little time with his family in the last decade, sometimes he struggled fitting into the brotherly dynamic that the others clearly shared. Sitting with Joss, Hank and Grant, he could see how close they were.
“It was okay,” he replied and drank from the glass in front of him. He’d never been much of a drinker, no doubt due to watching his father drown his sorrows in liquor time and time again. And Jake liked to be in control one hundred percent of the time.
“You’re a lousy liar,” Joss remarked and grinned. “But this is a small town, so you can’t avoid her forever.”
“I don’t plan on it,” he said casually, thinking it was exactly why he intended on staying at O’Sullivan’s for a while. “But it was a long time ago, and I don’t imagine Abby spares me a thought from one day to the next.”
Hank, always the peacemaker, changed the subject. “You staying for the wedding?”
“Of course. Weddings and funerals, that’s me.” Jake felt bad the moment he said the words, because he hadn’t returned for Joss’s wife’s funeral. He’d been unable to take leave at the time, as he’d been deployed on a mission. He looked at his brother. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”
Joss shook his head. “It’s okay. We all get it, you know, what you did over there. We know how important it was. I don’t imagine it was easy settling back into civilian life.”
He shrugged again. His brothers knew some of where he’d been and what he’d done during his two tours. Only some. It wasn’t exactly dinner conversation. “I take it day by day.”
“We’re really proud of you.”
Grant’s words wrapped around his bones. He wondered how proud they’d be if they knew he’d slept with his best friend’s wife two days after the
other man’s funeral. But perhaps they wouldn’t judge. Perhaps they’d understand that his connection to Abby ran deep—deeper than he’d ever been able to admit, even to himself.
When he’d returned to Cedar River a few weeks earlier, he knew he had some bridges to mend with his family. Other than Mitch, he rarely talked to the rest of them. He had a busy life in Sacramento and spent most of his time working. He and his business partner Trent had made a lot of money in a very short time, and they had recently been offered a ridiculously large sum by a competitor who wanted to buy them out. The offer was still on the table, as neither Jake nor Trent was certain they wanted to sell. If they did, he would have to do something else, and he wasn’t sure what. Buy a new house? A new car or motorbike? Go on a long vacation? Invest in another business? The truth was, Jake had no real inclination to settle anywhere. He leased a fully furnished condo in Sacramento, drove a top-of-the-range SUV, had more money than he knew what to do with...and carried around an emptiness he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to fill. Of course, he thought about the things some of his friends back in Sacramento had—a wife and kids, or at the very least, some kind of committed relationship with another human being.
But...something held him back.
He couldn’t work out why he was so reluctant to have a serious relationship. His dating life had been casual. Too casual. The last time he’d spent the entire night with a woman had been six years ago. With Abby. And that had ended up being a disaster.
Tired of thinking about it, Jake bailed on his brothers and headed for the hotel. O’Sullivan’s was a boutique-style hotel, with thirty-odd rooms, two restaurants and a bar, and several conference rooms. The place was considered one of the best accommodations in the state. The concierge greeted him and he was quickly checked in. Jake was just about to head to his room when he recognized Kieran O’Sullivan striding across the foyer. Kieran’s family owed the hotel—as well as half of the commercial property in Cedar River—and the other man was a doctor on staff at the local hospital. In fact, he’d been on duty the night Mitch had been pulled from the mine shaft accident, and Jake suspected that the reason his brother was alive was because of the man standing in front of him. They weren’t exactly friends, but over the years their high school rivalry had dissipated, and now they were friendly enough.
