by Joanna Sims
“Do you have children?” Ben asked as they headed out of the barn.
“No,” Lee said a bit wistfully to Colt’s ears. “But one day—hopefully real soon—I will.”
Ben and Lee went on to discuss a timeline for the project while Colt’s brain was stuck on Lee’s comment. Was there a boyfriend in the mix he hadn’t uncovered? Or was Lee just wishful thinking out loud about children? Colt couldn’t be sure, but he did know one thing without any doubt—Lee was dreaming of a child in the near future and he was the right man to make that dream come true for her.
* * *
“Hand me that wrench, will you?” Liam pointed to the toolbox next to his 1940s Ford truck he had been restoring for the past several years. Liam, a large animal veterinarian with a thriving practice and a father of three, rarely came out to work on his pet project.
Colt bent down and grabbed the wrench, handing it to his brother. His mind was still back at Strides with Lee. He couldn’t get the image of seeing her with that prosthetic leg. He wished it wasn’t true, but it was jarring. It had never occurred to him that Lee had experienced such an obvious trauma. He felt protective of Lee. Perhaps that just came with the territory when his heart had been stolen by her smile. Colt wished he could have been there to protect her from whatever terrible event had happened in her life that had resulted in her losing part of her limb.
“I tell you, Colt, I had no idea how much of a headache I was saving for myself when Kate and I eloped. Callie’s wedding is taking over our lives.”
“I still can’t believe she’s getting married.” Callie was engaged to a young man, Tony, who lived in California. They had met at a convention for individual’s with Down syndrome; from Callie’s telling of it, it was love at first sight for both of them.
“That makes two of us.” Liam gritted his teeth and tried to loosen a bolt in the engine. “Four of us, really. Tony’s parents, Kate and I are on the same page. We’ve slowed this thing down to a crawl but we can’t stop them from loving each other. Tony’s parents are making the move from California to Bozeman. We’ve renovated Kate’s old house for them so they can be independent but close enough for us to support them.”
Colt stood with his arms crossed in front of his body. He mused allowed, “Callie’s getting married.”
“Yep,” Liam said. “And I just want them to give me the bill at the end. I don’t want to discuss silverware and flowers and venues. Just give me the bill and I’ll pay it. Shouldn’t that be enough?” Liam asked rhetorically. “But, no. They want me to be involved.”
Liam stood upright. “I now know more about wedding dress silhouettes than I have ever wanted to know.”
“It’s going to be pretty amazing to see you walking her down the aisle,” Colt said.
That brought a smile to Liam’s face. “I have to agree with you there. She’s grown up so much—she’s lived on her own, she’s gotten engaged, she has a job. She’s been working on a cookbook of her favorite recipes that she wants to self-publish. She’s just exceptional. By any standards.”
“From what I’ve seen, she does a great job out there at Lee’s place.”
Liam wiped some grease off his hands. “Lee is a godsend. Kate says that Lee’s program made a huge difference in Callie’s life. It didn’t seem like therapy to her. It was just her doing some activities on a horse and Kate thinks it went a long way to build Callie’s self-esteem.”
Colt saw a crack in a door and he decided to just open it. “You’ve worked with Lee for a while now, haven’t you?”
Liam grabbed two bottles of water out of his cooler and handed one to Colt. “Going on ten years now, I guess.”
Colt gave a little shake of his head. Lee had been living under his nose this whole time! The woman he felt, in his gut, was the woman he was supposed to marry had been mere miles away. Where was he during this time? Why hadn’t he met her before this?
“Do you know what happened to her?” Colt asked bluntly, wanting to cut through the fat and get to the meat of the matter.
If Liam suspected his question had an ulterior motive, it didn’t show in his expression. “You mean to her leg?”
Colt nodded.
“Car accident,” his brother told him.
Colt swallowed hard several times. The next question he asked was only posed to confirm what he seemed to already know in his gut.
“Was there anyone else involved?”
Liam finished his water, recapped the bottle and tossed the empty bottle near his cooler to retrieve later.
“I don’t know all the details.” His brother returned to his work on the old Ford engine. “But from what I’ve heard, she was driving and her husband was in the passenger seat.”
Chapter Six
Lee had lived in a 1932 charming bungalow in downtown Bozeman for several years. It was the perfect house for a family because it had a large backyard with a white picket fence and a huge tree already outfitted with a tire swing. Buying this house was the first step she had taken to building the family of her dreams. Lee pulled out her savings account register, wrote down a deposit she had made the night before and then looked at the total. She had been saving for years to start her family and the numbers in her account were nearly large enough to make her dream a reality.
Lee slipped the register back into the drawer. After she slowly the pushed the drawer shut, she picked up a crystal-framed picture of Michael and her on their wedding day. The two people in that photograph were so young. So naive.
“Almost there, my love.” Lee ran her fingers over Michael’s face. “A promise made is a promise kept.”
She stared at that photograph for several more minutes and then closed her eyes tightly to block out the image of Colt’s face that snuck into her mind without permission. Lately, her early morning thoughts, which had always been reserved for Michael, were being intermingled with thoughts of Colt. Even worse, before she went to sleep, thoughts of Colt had overtaken memories of Michael—memories that had always lulled her to sleep. She didn’t want to think of Colt as much as she did—it angered her. Her mind was preoccupied with the man and her body was betraying her, as well. For years, she had suppressed the desire to make love. If she couldn’t make love with her one and only forever, she couldn’t imagine ever sharing that part of herself with anyone ever again. And yet, when she closed her eyes, thoughts of Colt’s lips on her lips and his hands on her body would not be denied. Because of Colt, she was tossing and turning in bed. Because of Colt, she was experiencing something that she hadn’t in such a long time that she had forgotten what it felt like—sexual frustration. Lee had finally given in to her body’s demands and had begun to find ways to pleasure herself—to ease the ache in her own body. And when she did, her thoughts weren’t of her dear, sweet Michael. Her thoughts were always of Colt.
“Stop it!” Lee chastised herself aloud as she replaced the photograph carefully in its honored spot on her desk. “It isn’t real! It’s just...”
Lee shrugged her shoulders and then shook her head, trying to come up with an explanation she could convince herself of. “It’s just brain chemistry tricking me into thinking there is something more when there clearly isn’t.”
Determined to get through a day without dwelling on Colt, particularly when she had so much to get done before the summer session started, she leaned over to search the computer bag at her feet for her laptop. Her latest grant proposal was due in two days and with the summer program also starting in two days, she needed to finish the proposal and submit it today.
“Oh, no. No!” Lee rummaged through the computer bag, unzipping pockets, searching and then moving on to the next compartment. “Darn it!”
How could she have been so scatterbrained when she left the property? She had left her laptop at Strides! Lee grabbed the crutches that she had leaned up against the desk and made her way to the living room where she h
ad left her prosthetic. Lee lowered herself down on the couch and slipped her crutches into the space between the couch and end table where they would be out of the way but easily accessible when she needed them again.
“Can you believe I did that? If my head wasn’t attached, I swear.” Lee rubbed Chester’s head. The chubby gray feline trilled, blinked his eyes at her and then rolled over onto his back for a belly rub.
Lee obliged Chester, giving him a quick rub before she turned her gel prosthetic liner inside out, put the base of the liner up against the end of her leg and then rolled the liner up over her knee to her thigh. Putting on her liner was second nature now. She checked to make sure there wasn’t any air between her skin and the sleeve before she bent her knee to a forty-five degree angle and gently pushed it into the socket of the prosthesis that she used for her everyday running around. Lee stood up and rolled the socket sleeve with a vibrant galaxy print up over her knee until it was snuggly fit to her upper thigh.
“I’ll be back, sweet boy.” Lee planted a kiss on Chester’s head.
On her way out the door, she grabbed her wallet, her phone and her keys. She could imagine exactly where she left the computer. It was on her desk packed up with the extension cord wrapped neatly on top, waiting to be put in her bag. Lee walked quickly to the detached garage she had built behind her historical house and climbed behind the wheel of her putty-gray Jeep Gladiator. She put the key in the ignition, turned it and then realized that the engine wasn’t turning over. She tried again, pumping her foot on the gas.
“Seriously?” Lee hit her hand on the steering wheel. “What is going on today?”
She didn’t bother lifting up the hood because she wouldn’t know what the heck to look for anyway. The next-door neighbor had jumper cables, but she knew they were out of town because she had been picking up their mail for them. The neighbors across the street had jumper cables—of course, she had watched the entire family load up their boat and leave for a day of fun on the lake. She sent her friend and neighbor Shayna Wade a text. Shayna, a university professor, responded quickly that she was on campus prepping for summer classes.
Of course she would be. Just like her, Shayna was always working.
After exhausting her neighborhood options, Lee figured that her quickest solution was to get in touch with her father-in-law rather than hunting down neighbors who may or may not have cables. For all she knew, it could be something other than the battery!
“Hey, Lee. I was just talking about you.” Boot thankfully answered the phone on the second ring.
“You were?”
“I was.”
“Tell Gilda hi for me.” She assumed that Boot was talking to the property manager because she seemed to always find the two of them together lately. “My truck won’t start, Boot, and I need to get my computer out of my office so I can finish the grant. Can you grab my computer, bring it here and see if you can figure out why my truck won’t start?”
“Hold on a sec,” Boot said and she could tell by the more muffled sound of his next words that he was holding the phone away from his mouth and speaking to someone nearby.
“You’re about to leave, aren’t you?” Boot asked the person she assumed was Gilda. “Do you mind dropping off Lee’s laptop at her house? Her truck won’t start.”
“That would be out of Gilda’s way, Boot,” she interjected.
“I’m talking to Colt,” Boot told her.
“He doesn’t need to come to my house,” she protested more loudly and strongly than she had intended. The tone in her voice sounded harsh and urgent. The man had already invaded the space in her mind—the reality of him invading her private space made her break out into an immediate sweat.
But nonetheless, she cringed at the thought of letting her conflicted feelings for Colt slip out into the world. Luckily, Boot was focused on fixing her problem and not on the odd way she had objected to Colt coming to her private world.
“Sweet Girl threw a shoe, Lee,” Boot explained. He sounded just like Boot always did, which allowed her to breathe a bit easier. Her father-in-law appeared to be oblivious to her discomfort over Colt. “I need to take care of that first. If you need to have this computer right away, Colt can have it to you in ten minutes or so.”
She needed her computer and she certainly didn’t want to stop Boot from caring for Sweet Girl just because her feelings were topsy-turvy over Colt.
“You’ll come later to look at my truck though, right?” she asked.
“Do you have jumper cables, Colt?” Boot asked and then after a short pause said, “Colt will give you a jump. If it’s the battery, problem solved. If not, at least you’ll have your computer.”
“Okay,” she said, feeling boxed in. “What’s he doing there now anyway?”
“He’s been helping Ben,” Boot reminded her. “They’ve been working all morning to get enough juice into the barn for the fans. They’ve got a plumber friend here too, making a plan to install the watering systems.”
“Oh. That’s right,” Lee muttered. “I forgot.”
Her mind had been so cluttered with getting ready for the first week of the summer session and finishing her grant proposal to install a pool on the property for aquatic therapy on time, the fans and watering system, as important as they were to her, had taken a back seat in her brain. And if she were being honest with herself, she trusted Colt to get the job done for her. She trusted him.
“You’ve got a lot on your plate, right now, Lee,” Boot said. “Just go inside the house, relax for a minute and wait for Colt. You sound tired.”
“I am tired.” She leaned her head back onto the driver’s seat headrest and closed her eyes. So many things in life were out of her control—she had learned that hard lesson years ago. Having Colt come to her house was really a molehill and she shouldn’t turn it into a mountain. “Is Sweet Girl okay?”
“She’s fine. I’m going to start getting her fixed up once I hang up with you.”
Lee ended the call with her father-in-law, swung her legs out of her truck and hopped down to the ground. She walked around the side of the house to the front porch and sat down on the swing. She resisted the urge to go to the bathroom to check her reflection in the mirror. She looked how she looked and she wasn’t going to primp for Colt. Her hair, which hadn’t been washed for a couple of days, was pulled back into a messy ponytail and she didn’t change out of Michael’s threadbare college NYU T-shirt or her frayed cutoff denim shorts. This was how she looked on a weekend at home. This was who she was and she didn’t need to cover that up for Colt.
While she waited for Colt, she kept herself busy by answering texts and emails on her phone. Both of her parents, still married, her older sister, Tessa and her beloved grandmother, for whom she was named, all lived in Central Florida now. It was difficult to be so far away from her family but at least they had technology on their side; she video-chatted with her sister several nights a week. Lee was in the middle of sending her sister a series of recent pictures of Chester when she saw Colt’s unmistakable ruby-red truck driving slowly up the road. She tucked her phone into the back pocket of her jean shorts, went down the porch steps and waved her hand to him so he would be able to more easily find her house. She felt a small jolt of excitement and nervousness when she caught sight of his handsome face—darn dopamine. It always felt good—physically good—to see Colt.
Colt pulled his truck into the narrow driveway beside her house, parked and shut off the engine. He gave her that million-dollar smile of his as he delivered her laptop to her.
“I haven’t been on this street since high school. This is the Millers’ old place, right?”
She gave him one definitive nod. “That’s who I bought it from.”
“You’ve done a lot with it,” he said, still looking at her house.
“It’s home.” Lee wrapped her arms around her laptop and held it in
front of her body like a shield. “Thank you for my laptop.”
“No problem. I was on my way back to Sugar Creek. This was on my way.”
“I’m going to put this in the house.” She tapped the laptop case. “Boot said that you could look at my truck?”
He nodded, taking a step backward toward his truck. “I’m going to pull my truck up to your garage.”
As he had before—as most people just instinctively did—Colt glanced down at her prosthesis. She watched his face carefully, examining him closely for any sign of revulsion. It would be so easy to dismiss him if she could find one shred of evidence that her disability made him uncomfortable.
“I’ll meet you out back.” The sooner she got Colt out of her private world, the better off she felt she’d be. In her mind, he looked like a fish out of water standing on her manicured lawn in his cowboy gear. Her neighborhood was filled with established professionals—realtors, bankers, university professors and small business owners—not cattle folk. They lived on the outskirts of town. A reassuring thought came into her mind as she set the laptop on an antique sideboard table just inside the front door: he doesn’t belong here.
Lee hurried to the detached garage where Colt was waiting for her. Colt had managed to maneuver his oversized Ford truck into the second parking spot in the small garage. Lee had to turn sideways so she could squeeze into her Jeep.
“Pop the hood for me, will you?” Colt asked from the front of her Jeep.
She popped the hood and then put the key in the ignition. “I’ve never had any trouble with it before.”
Colt lifted the hood, propped it open and then scanned the engine. He connected the jumper cables between her Jeep and his truck before he started the Ford. He revved his own engine a couple of times and after several moments, he said, “Give it a try now.”