by Lisa Jackson
The old tractor chugged up the slight incline to the barn and Dani carefully backed the trailer into the open door. The boys, though tired and dusty, put on their gloves and began placing the bales on the elevator and stacking them in the loft.
Dani cut the engine of the tractor and hopped to the ground. Climbing into the hayloft, she began to help Cody and Jake stack the bales while Jonathon loaded the elevator. The interior of the weathered barn was dark and musty, but the scent of freshly mown hay mingled with the dust.
“That about does it,” Dani said with a tired grin as Jake shouldered the last bale into place. After climbing down the ladder, she tossed her gloves onto an old barrel and pushed the hair from her face. “Now, who wants a Coke?”
“Make mine a double,” Jake teased, offering Dani a cocky sixteen-year-old grin as he jumped down from the loft.
“Mine, too,” his younger brother agreed.
“Cody?”
“Yep,” her son said with a smile.
“You got it,” she laughed. “And Cody, you’re off duty tonight; I’ll do the chores and clear the table. You’ve worked hard enough for one day.”
Cody beamed, scratched Runt behind the ears and walked with the other boys to the back porch. Dani went inside the house, pulled the Cokes out of the refrigerator and opened the chilled bottles before returning to the back porch and passing them around. Jake held the cold bottle to his hot forehead before tossing back his sweaty head, placing the bottle to his lips and swallowing the contents of the bottle in one long drink.
“I get the message,” Dani said, returning to the house and grabbing three more Cokes. She took them to the back porch and was relieved that the boys’ thirst had apparently slackened. Cody, Jake and Jonathon were content to sip from their bottles.
“I’m gonna get the mail,” Cody said, while the two older boys sat on the rail finishing their drinks.
Dani felt her heart twist in pain. Cody never gave up thinking that his dad would write him again. “All right.”
Cody whistled to Runt and ran around the corner of the house. Dani’s shoulders slumped in defeat and she took a long swallow of the cold cola. Every day this summer Cody had run to the mailbox expecting a letter from his father and it had never come. Dani didn’t think this day would be any different. Nor would the days that followed. If only Blake hadn’t written the one friendly letter and buoyed Cody’s spirits.
If I ever get my hands on him, I’ll strangle him, she thought angrily, her fingers tightening around her bottle.
While the two brothers talked, Dani leaned against a post supporting the roof of the porch and stared across the fence to Caleb Johnson’s property and Grizzly Creek. Things had changed in the past week.
The day after Chase had come to her house, heavy equipment had rolled over Johnson’s land. Not only had there been dredging in the creek, but several loads of gravel had been carefully spread in the water, and a few fallen fir trees had been strategically placed along the banks of the stream.
While Dani had been bucking hay, she’d observed Chase, stripped to his jeans, as he supervised the operation. He was always at the creek at sunrise, carefully studying and working in the clear water. He supervised the placement of the gravel and boulders as well as the digging of deeper pools in the channel of the stream.
She couldn’t help but notice the rippling strength of his muscles as he’d helped pull a log into position, or the way his shoulders would bunch when things weren’t going just as he’d planned. The bright sun had begun to bleach his blond hair and his skin had darkened with each day. From her position driving the tractor, Dani had been able to observe him covertly and she’d begun to recognize his gestures; the way he would rake his fingers through his hair in disgust, his habit of chewing on his thumbnail when he was tense, or the manner in which he would set his palms on his hips when he was angry.
Several times she’d found him looking her way, and each time that he’d caught her eye, he’d offered a lazy, mocking grin. One time he’d even had the nerve to wave to her, and Dani, her cheeks burning unexpectedly, had responded by quickly stepping on the throttle of the tractor and turning her full attention to the task of getting the hay into the barn.
“What’s goin’ on over there?” Jake asked when he noticed Dani staring at the heavy machinery on the adjoining property. “I think Johnson’s hired someone to clean up the creek—make it more livable for trout.” Actually she knew it for a fact. Just to make sure that Chase had been straight with her, she’d called the Better Business Bureau in Boise and found out that Relive Incorporated was, indeed, a business owned by Chase McEnroe and Caleb Johnson.
“So he’s cleaning up Grizzly Creek for that resort, Summer Ridge or whatever it’s called, right?”
“Right.” Dani’s back stiffened slightly.
“Is it named after you?”
Dani smiled at the irony of the question and shook her head. “No. I’m really a Hawthorne,” she explained. “This land is Hawthorne land and the piece next to it, the land where the equipment is parked, used to belong to the Summers family.”
“But not you?”
“No . . . it was owned by my husband’s family,” she said, feeling rankled again when she thought about Blake and how he had sold his family’s homestead only to gamble away the money.
“My pa can’t wait for the resort,” Jake said. “He says it will put Martinville on the map.”
“No doubt about it,” Dani replied with a frown.
“Pa says that his business is bound to double over the next year or two, with all the workers Johnson will have to hire. And then, once the resort is open, Pa expects to make a bundle!”
“Nobody’s ever made a bundle selling groceries,” Jake’s younger brother, Jonathon, commented with all the knowledge of a fifteen-year-old.
“Just you wait!”
“Mom! Hey, Mom!” Cody screamed at the top of his lungs as he raced around the corner of the house. His boyish face was flushed with excitement and he was nearly out of breath.
Dani’s heart constricted.
“He wrote again! Look! There’s a letter from Dad!” Cody was jumping up and down with his exhilaration and Runt was barking wildly at the boy’s heels.
Dani nearly fell through the weathered boards of the porch. Damn you, Blake! She managed to force a tender smile for her son. “What did he say?”
“That he’s comin’ home!” Cody looked from one of the Anders brothers to the other. “You hear that, my pa is comin’ home!”
“Home? Here?” Dani asked.
“Yep! To see us and Uncle Bob!” Cody was holding the letter triumphantly and Dani guessed from the way that Cody was acting that Jake and Jonathon were two of the kids who had given him trouble about his absentee father. The brothers had the decency to look sheepish and Dani had to bite her tongue in order to refrain from giving the boys a lecture on the cruelty of gossip. At nine years of age, Cody would have to fight most of his own battles. And this time, at least for the moment, he’d won.
“I think we’d better be goin’,” Jake said, handing Dani his empty bottle.
“Just a minute and I’ll pay you.” She took the bottles, placed them in the case by the back door and went into the house to the old desk in a corner of the kitchen. Once there she withdrew the checkbook from the top drawer, sighed when she saw the balance, and paid the Anders brothers their wages.
“Here you go,” she said, giving each boy a check when she returned to the porch. “And thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome, and you’ll give us a call if you have any more work to do?” Jake asked.
“Sure thing,” Dani said.
Jake sighed in relief. “Hey, Cody, good news about your dad,” the cocky sixteen-year-old said.
“Yeah,” Jonathon added, following his brother around the corner of the house. A few seconds later the rumbling sound of Jake’s pickup could be heard as they drove off.
“I told you he’d come back!” Co
dy said, his brown eyes bright with pleasure.
“You sure did,” Dani replied, feeling the corners of her mouth pinch. “Why don’t you let me read what he said?”
“Sure.” Cody handed the letter to her and Dani skimmed the hastily scrawled note. It was less than a page but there was the promise that Blake would return to Martinville “sometime this fall.” She looked at the postmark. It read Molalla, Oregon; a town Dani had never heard of.
The letter was vague enough not to pin Blake down but with enough promise to keep Cody’s hopes up. Dani felt all the rage of seven long years sear through her heart.
“When do you think he’ll get here?” Cody asked.
“I don’t know,” Dani replied honestly.
“Before school starts?”
“I . . . I wouldn’t count on it. . . .”
Cody flinched. “Yeah, I know you wouldn’t. But I do! Dad says he’s comin’ home and he is!” He started to walk into the kitchen but stopped, a sudden uncomfortable thought crossing his mind. “When Dad gets here, he will stay with us, won’t he?”
“No, Cody,” Dani said, taking a firm stand.
“Why not?”
“Because your father and I aren’t married. He can’t stay here. It wouldn’t be right.”
“But he’s my dad and he lived here before!”
“I know, but Blake will probably want to be in town with his brother, Bob. He won’t want to stay here.”
“You don’t know that! He’s coming back for me and you! So you’d better let him stay here because if he has to live with Uncle Bob, then I’m going to live with him!” Cody said, taking the letter from her hand and marching through the door.
Why now? Dani wondered, fighting the tears behind her eyes. Why did Blake have to come back—or promise to—right now, when Cody was the most trouble he’d ever been and Caleb Johnson was hell-bent to take her land from her?
“Don’t borrow trouble,” she whispered staunchly to herself. Blake hadn’t returned in seven years; there was little chance he’d show up at all. Either way, Cody would be brokenhearted all over again.
“Just stay in Oregon, Blake,” she muttered, looking past the equipment on the Johnson property. It was nearly dark and the field was empty of the workers that had been there during the day. Even Chase seemed to have disappeared. Probably plotting with his partner, she thought bitterly, but couldn’t really make herself believe that Chase was quite that treacherous. “And neither is a rattlesnake,” she muttered as she looked at the troublesome sky.
Thunderclouds, heavy with the promise of rain, roiled over the peaks of the Rockies to darken the evening sky.
A cool summer shower. That was what she needed, Dani thought sadly. The summer had been unbearably hot this year and all of the tension with Cody as well as Caleb Johnson and Chase McEnroe was getting to her. The thought of rain pelting against the windowpanes and settling the dust was comforting. Maybe the rain would wash away some of the strain . . . but not if Blake were really coming back.
With a sigh Dani walked into the house and deduced from the muted sound of rock hits coming from a radio that Cody was in his room. She wanted to go to her son, try to reason with him about his father, but decided it would be better to wait until they had both cooled off.
Wearily climbing the stairs, she stopped suddenly as the thought struck her that Blake might be returning to Martinville with the express purpose of taking Cody away from her. “Not in a million years!” she thought aloud, her fingers clenching the banister. As quickly as the horrible thought came, it disappeared. Blake hadn’t wanted Cody in the first place; he’d even gone so far as to suggest that Dani have an abortion in the early months of her pregnancy. So why would he want a nine-year-old boy now?
Refusing to be trapped in the bitter memories of her stormy marriage to Blake, Dani stripped out of her dirty sweat-soaked clothes, brushed the dust from her hair and twisted it to the top of her head before settling gratefully into a hot bath.
The warm water eased the tension from her stiff muscles and lulled her into a sense of security. If Blake had the audacity to try and claim Cody now, he’d have the surprise of his life. Long ago Dani had shed her mousy personality in favor of that of a new independent woman. No one, not even Blake Summers, would take her son away from her; just as she wouldn’t allow anyone to steal her land. And whether Chase McEnroe knew it or not, that’s exactly what Caleb Johnson had tried to do over the past few years. He’d offered to buy her out far below the market value and then he’d tried to say that she’d swindled him on the sale of the Summers’ place. Yep, Caleb Johnson was as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and he wanted her land; the land her grandparents had worked to save in the Depression, the land her ancestors had cleared and farmed with the strength of their backs and the sweat of their brow.
And maybe you’re being a fool, she thought as she squeezed the rag over her shoulders and let the hot water drip down her back. Maybe you should just sell the place and live comfortably for the rest of your life.
“Never,” she whispered to herself. “At least not to Johnson.”
She smiled to herself with renewed determination and settled lower in the tub.
* * *
Chase stared at the lights in the cabin windows long after he’d seen Dani go inside. The first heavy drops of rain had begun to fall and he was still deciding whether or not to confront her again. It had been nearly a week since she’d thrown him out of her home. For six days he’d respected her wishes and kept away from her, but watching her work in the fields, her lithe body handling machinery and heavy bales of hay that would have strained the muscles of a man twice her size, gave him second thoughts.
“You’re a fool,” he chastised, but ignored his own warning and slipped through the barbed wires before climbing the short hill toward the cluster of buildings on the small rise.
The rain had begun in earnest. Large drops slid down his face as thunder rumbled in the mountains. He picked up his pace and ran the last hundred yards to the shelter of the barn before shaking the water from his hair and striding to the back porch.
Dani was already there, sitting in an old rocker near the door and wearing only her bathrobe.
“Dani?” Chase called, hoping not to startle her.
She nearly jumped out of her skin at the sight of him. “What’re you doing here?” she asked, recognizing his voice before being able to discern his craggy features.
“Escaping the storm.”
Leaning back in the rocker, she narrowed her eyes as she studied him. “So why didn’t you escape to Caleb Johnson’s house?”
“Too far away.” He walked up the two steps to the porch and rested one hip against the rail as he looked at her. “Besides, I wanted to talk to you again.”
“I thought we settled everything last time.”
“Not really.” He leaned against the post supporting the roof of the porch, folded his arms over his chest and stared down at her with shaded eyes. The rain had turned his blond hair brown and dampened the shoulders and back of his shirt. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. The last time I was here you insinuated that Caleb tried to steal your land.”
“It wasn’t an insinuation.”
“Fact?”
Dani hedged. “Not exactly . . .”
“Then what happened?”
A simple question. And one of public record. Then why did she hesitate to tell him? “Why don’t you ask Johnson?”
“He put me off, just like you. Right now he’s out of town.”
“For how long?”
“A few more days.”
Dani’s teeth clamped together. She still hadn’t had it out with Caleb.
“Look, I’d just like to know what’s going on between the two of you because, whether I like it or not, I’ve been put right smack dab in the middle of your . . . disagreement.”
“Disagreement?” she repeated, smiling at the understatement.
“For lack of a better word.”
Drumming her fingers on the edge of the rocker, she looked across the sloping land and listened to the heavy raindrops pound against the roof and run in the gutters. “It’s no secret really,” she said, turning to face him again. “About two years ago, Caleb Johnson tried to take me to court. He insisted that the land my great-great-grandfather had homesteaded—this place—wasn’t staked out properly, and according to his survey, I was actually living on what is now his property.”
“That should have been easy enough to prove.”
“You’d have thought so,” she whispered.
“So?”
“Well, Johnson’s land is more than just his. Part of it used to belong to my ex-husband, Blake. He sold it to Caleb Johnson years ago, when we were first married. My property, which is known as the Hawthorne place, bordered Blake’s family’s acreage. Once Blake sold out to Johnson, Caleb became my neighbor.”
“And the Summers’ place doesn’t exist any longer.”
“Right. It’s all part of Johnson’s spread, although he made one minor concession to Blake’s family and decided to name his resort Summer Ridge.”
“What does that have to do with property lines?”
“Johnson claimed that when Blake sold him the land, he’d meant to include the strip of my property on the ridge of the mountains.” She pointed westerly, toward the Rockies. “I don’t farm the entire acreage; part of the land rises into the foothills.”
“And has hot springs on it.”
Surprised, she stiffened in the chair. “That’s why Johnson wants the land so badly, I suppose.”
Chase shifted and rubbed his hand around the back of his neck. “I suppose. So what happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“The judge threw the case out of court. It cost me several thousand dollars in legal fees, but the land is mine.”