by Pamela Clare
Compared to dying in a dank mine shaft? “No.”
“I got your card. Thanks.” He seemed to struggle for words.
Her Father’s Day card. She’d forgotten about it.
“I’m sorry for whatever I said this morning.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t mean it. That was rum talking, not me.”
“I know.” Still, the apology felt good.
“Hey, Lexi.” Kendra sat in a chair near the window. Wearing a T-shirt and jeans and not a stitch of makeup, she got to her feet and walked hesitantly toward the bed, as if she wasn’t sure she was welcome. She reached out, patted Lexi’s hand, and Lexi could see she’d been crying. “You sure did give us a scare.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.” Her dad cleared his throat. “I want you to know I quit drinking. For real this time.”
“You … you did?” That was news.
“I made God a promise. If He got you out of that damned mine alive and in one piece, I wouldn’t touch the bottle again—except on special occasions.”
She frowned at that last part. “You’ll have to keep your word.”
“Exactly,” said Kendra, pointedly.
“Austin is out in the hall. I promised him I’d let him know when you were awake—if you feel like seeing him, that is.” Her dad grinned.
“Quit teasing the poor girl, Bob,” Kendra said. “You know she does.”
Austin must have been right outside the door. He poked his head in and walked over to her, bending down to kiss her cheek. “Hey. How do you feel?”
He’d been home and had a shower, his jaw clean-shaven.
“A bit loopy. They gave me a nerve block or something. I can’t feel my leg.”
“Good.” He smiled, but the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes.
She reached up, cupped his jaw. “Thank you. Thank you for coming down there after me. I was so afraid.”
She stopped there, unable to say more, the aftermath of terror still sharp.
“You weren’t the only one.” He took her hand, kissed it, warm fingers stroking hers. “When I saw you down there … I’ve never been that afraid in my life. Jesus.”
“You didn’t act like you were afraid.”
“No? Well, just watch. Come February, I’ll be up for an Oscar.”
“The whole town was there.”
He nodded. “I’d say only about half of it. They closed Knockers, then reopened to celebrate after you were safe. Joe came up with a new drink in your honor, and the first round was on the house for Team members and law enforcement. Or so I was told. I wasn’t there.”
“Really?” That was so sweet.
“We care about our own in this town.”
A rush of warmth passed through her at those words.
“Do you want to know what he named the drink?” Austin asked.
Uh-oh. “Okay. Sure. Tell me.”
“The Sexy Lexi.”
Lexi smiled. “That nickname is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”
“Blame Hawke.”
“Puh-lease! I know it wasn’t just Eric.”
“What? You think I had anything to do with that?” His look of feigned innocence was comical. “Okay, guilty as charged.”
She had to know. “Did they find him? Did they find Ready?”
Austin nodded. “He was at the bottom of the shaft.”
“What about Jack? He stayed with me. He taught me that song. If not for him…” She could see from the looks on their faces that they didn’t believe Jack was real. “I just imagined him, didn’t I?”
“Yeah.” Austin gave her hand a gentle squeeze. “The mind does amazing things to protect us.”
“He seemed so real.”
Her father smiled. “Your mother used to sing ‘The Blackbirds and the Thrushes’ when she rocked you to sleep. I can’t believe you remembered it. It’s an old mining song that was popular in these parts. Whoever Jack might have been, whether he was real or not, your mama was with you in there. That’s what I believe.”
“If I was only remembering a song Mom taught me, then why didn’t I hallucinate my mother?” None of it made any sense to her.
Austin shrugged. “No idea.”
She remembered the black emptiness beneath her. “How far was it to the bottom?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
She nodded.
“It was a good hundred twenty yards.”
The thought made her stomach flip, made it hard to breathe.
Austin kissed her forehead, stroked her hair. “I wish you hadn’t asked.”
“So do I.” Then she remembered she had something to tell him. “Austin, I … What you said the other night …”
“I meant every word.”
Why was this so freaking hard?
“I … I love you. I do. I love you.”
He pressed her hand to his lips, gave her a soft smile. “So you finally admit it.”
Austin called Sutherland late Sunday night to ask for Monday and Friday off. That gave him five days to take care of Lexi, who was recovering from surgery and learning how to manage on crutches and who would need to come back to the trauma center on Tuesday for her second rabies treatment. As it turned out, however, Bob Jewell had moved all of her stuff back into her room at the inn. When she was discharged just before noon on Monday, she went back to the inn.
A part of Austin was angry about it. After all, Lexi had intended to move in with him. But he could see that Bob was trying to make up for what he’d done to drive his daughter away. Austin didn’t want to get in the way of that.
It was Tuesday evening, after Lexi had lost sleep to nightmares, that Austin made a decision. He brought Mack and moved in with her.
Bob didn’t object when Austin showed up with his backpack, an excited puppy, a dog crate, bowls, kibble, and an assortment of dog toys. “You know the way. I’m betting you’ve slept in her room before.”
“No, Bob, I have not.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Bob’s eyes narrowed. “Then where did you go? Don’t try to fool me. I know you were having sex with my daughter.”
Lexi’s voice came from her bedroom. “You two are not having this conversation!”
Austin lowered his voice, smiled, whatever was left of the teenage boy in him getting a thrill out of finally being able to rub it in her father’s face. “We went anywhere we could. I had an inflatable mattress in the back of my Ford.”
“Well, damn.” Bob shook his head, then looked down at Mack. “Keep the dog out of the kitchen and away from guests.”
“Yes, sir.”
Britta flew home Wednesday, so Austin volunteered to pick her up, filling her in and answering her questions on the way back to Scarlet.
“Did they ever find the bastard’s body?” she asked.
Austin nodded. “The Team stayed around that night and searched for him. That shaft was a good hundred twenty yards deep. He was at the bottom.”
What he didn’t tell Britta—what he hadn’t told Lexi or her father—was that the protruding support beams that had caught and saved Lexi had collapsed during the evacuation, rotted wood finally giving out and falling more than three hundred feet and landing in pieces.
“Is it true that a knocker saved her?”
He told her what Lexi had seen and what he’d observed. “Some people believe the knocker was real. Lexi’s description is pretty detailed, from his dialect to the candle on his hat. A group of them have already been up to the mine to toss in some pastry crusts as a thank you. I believe she was in deep shock and hallucinating.”
“Wow.” For a time, Britta was silent, clearly thinking about this. “Thank you for saving my sister’s life, but please don’t dump her again. You broke her heart last time. Do it again, and I’ll bust both of your knees.”
He decided right then that Britta and Cheyenne should be kept apart.
After Britta arrived, he didn’t
get much time alone with Lexi. While she and Britta talked and did sister stuff, he helped her dad with the yard work, made a few meals to share with the family, did his share of dishes, played checkers with her old man—and enjoyed it. He watched as the four of them—Lexi, Britta, their father, and Kendra—made hesitant steps toward one another, their attempts to forge closer ties touching to witness.
He would never take his own family for granted again.
At night, he slept beside Lexi, getting her pain pills, helping her get comfortable, and holding her when the nightmares closed in.
He had a little help from Mack on that last one. The puppy seemed to know before Austin when she was having a bad dream and would whimper and slather Lexi with puppy kisses.
“You’re a rescue dog of a different sort, boy,” he told Mack at four in the morning on Thursday. “But you’re not sleeping between us. She’s my woman.”
“Are you seriously fighting with a puppy—over me?” Lexi gave a little laugh, looking tousled and beautiful despite the dark circles beneath her eyes.
“If that puppy had his way, I wouldn’t be able to do this.” Austin drew her against him, kissed her forehead, held her tight. “Go back to sleep. We’ve got you.”
Lexi was sitting on the sofa, her leg propped up on pillows, talking with Britta and waiting for Austin to get back from Food Mart Thursday afternoon, when her father walked into the room with a couple of photo albums under his arm.
He sat, put them on the coffee table. “I … Well, I thought you two might want to see these. They’re from the early years.”
Lexi and Britta gaped at him, then looked at each other. Lexi hadn’t known the albums existed, and she could tell from Britta’s expression that her sister hadn’t either. “We’d love to see them.”
He moved a chair over, he and Britta arranging themselves near the sofa so they could all see the pages. “I started dating your mother in my first year of high school. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”
Slowly, a story Lexi and Britta had never heard unfolded in images they’d never seen of a mother they barely remembered, her face so like theirs. Their parents had fallen in love, then skipped college to take over the inn from their mother’s aging parents.
“The inn came from mom’s side of the family?” Britta asked.
That was a revelation.
Lexi studied each photo, a bittersweet ache behind her breastbone. A wedding in the garden outside among the aspens, which had been little saplings back then. Their mother with a wreath of roses in her red hair. Their father with a mullet, his face handsome and young. A honeymoon in Cancun. Month-by-month photos of their mother during her pregnancies, first with Lexi and then with Britta. A photo of their father sitting on their mother’s hospital bed, holding Lexi on his lap, while their mother cradled newborn Britta, both of them happy.
First birthdays, second birthdays, third birthdays. The seasons and years moving by so quickly. Picnics. Halloween. An Easter egg hunt with matching pink dresses. A trip to Disneyland that neither Lexi nor Britta could recall.
“Mickey Mouse scared the hell out of both of you.” Her father chuckled, pointing to a photo of the two of them crying while someone in a Mickey Mouse costume bent down to say hello.
He ran his finger over a photo of their mother holding them both on her lap beside a Christmas tree. “That was our last Christmas with her.”
Lexi looked at the smiling, happy faces in the photo—a moment from a life she’d completely forgotten, a life that was about to change forever.
“The day she died…” Her father’s voice broke, his words trailing off.
But they knew the story. They’d gotten it from newspapers.
Lexi reached out, touched his hand. “Dad, you don’t have to—
“A drunk driver heading up the canyon tried to pass another driver. He hit your mother head-on coming around a curve. Her car… Her car went over the edge of the embankment, rolled down into the canyon.”
Lexi’s vision blurred, his words stirring dormant grief inside her.
“I drove down. The Team was called out. It seemed to me they were just standing around when they ought to be doing what they could to save her life.” He coughed, cleared his throat. “The fire department had to cut her body out of the car. It took almost all night. The coroner said she’d died instantly in the crash, but I always thought someone could have done CPR or something if they had just gotten to her sooner.”
He shut the photo album, set it gently on the coffee table. “Kendra’s right when she said some part of me died. God, when I told you girls … It broke my heart. You didn’t understand.”
Lexi remembered that day.
“The inn had been your mother’s pride and joy. I threw myself into making sure it survived. As long as I was working, I didn’t have to feel.”
Lexi thought she understood. He’d used work in the same way he’d been using alcohol—to numb himself.
But Britta looked angry, her face flushed, tears spilling down her cheeks. “You threw yourself into taking care of a business, but not your daughters, her daughters? Wow. That’s screwed up, Dad. Mom loved us more than she loved this place.”
His face crumpled. “When I looked at you two, I saw her.”
He wiped the tears away with his sleeve as if he were ashamed of them, then took a breath and cleared his throat. “I’ve spent the past few years thinking my life was over, that I had nothing but the inn. The love of my life was gone. My daughters were far away and didn’t want anything to do with me. My fault, I’ll grant you. My wife was angry all the time. Hell, that’s probably my fault, too. But when I heard Lexi had been abducted and had fallen down that mine … I don’t want to lose you girls, too.”
He coughed again, swallowed hard. “I know I haven’t been the father you deserve, the father your mother would have wanted me to be, but if you give me a chance, I’d like to make it up to you.”
“Oh, Dad.” Lexi reached for her father.
Britta did the same.
And for the first time she could remember, he wrapped his arms around both of them and held them tight.
Chapter 24
Austin had volunteered to drive Lexi to the orthopedic surgeon in Boulder on Friday afternoon, so he called Hawke that morning to ask whether he could drive into Denver to pick up Vic at the airport.
“Who is this guy anyway?” Hawke asked.
It took Austin a minute. Hawke thought Vic was a man?
Okay, this was going to be fun. “Vic is that friend from Chicago who bought the two of them tickets to the Adele concert and who’s doing everything possible to make sure Lexi goes back to Illinois.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to lose him in a ditch somewhere?”
“Nah, man.” Austin fought to keep the amusement out of his voice. “Hey, I can handle the competition. Besides, if Lexi stays, it needs to be because she wants to live here, not because we murdered her friend.”
He was serious about that last part. If she decided to go back to Chicago, he would have to let her go—and give her time to change her mind.
He hadn’t brought up the issue with her. They hadn’t talked about it even once. He didn’t want to press her to make a decision, didn’t want to do anything to drive her away. He’d said he’d give her time and, damn it, he would, even if it killed him.
“Yeah, okay, I see your point.” There was a moment of silence. “We just finished helping the city handle a controlled burn, so I’m smoky and sweaty. But who cares? I can duck out a little early today and pick this guy up. What does he look like?”
Oh, about five-four, thick dark hair, big brown eyes, a sweet face and even sweeter curves.
Hey, Austin loved Lexi with all his heart, but that didn’t mean he was blind.
“No clue.” He bit his lip. “Just make a sign that says ‘Vic Woodley.’”
“Woodley?” Hawke gave a snort. “The dude probably sips chardonnay, waxes his chest, and buf
fs his nails.”
Austin was biting the insides of his cheeks now. He gave Hawke Vic’s flight info. “Hey, man, I really appreciate this.”
“Yeah, well, that’s two you owe me, though I think uncuffing you from your bed ought to count double.”
“You just had to bring that up, didn’t you?” The bastard.
“Yeah.”
Austin got off the phone to find Lexi watching him.
“What’s so funny?”
He cleared his throat, wiped the grin off his face. “Oh, nothing. Hawke is just a real dumb shit sometimes.”
“Can he pick Vic up?”
“Oh, yeah. No problem there.”
Oh, how Austin wished he could be a fly on the wall at Denver International Airport. He would just love to see Hawke’s face when he realized Vic was a woman—a gorgeous woman at that. Lexi had shown Austin photos from her iPhone last night when she’d had trouble falling back asleep.
“Are you ready to go?” Austin grabbed his keys.
Lexi adjusted her crutches, then got to her feet. “I’m finally starting to get the hang of these things.”
“I’m coming, too.” Britta breezed in with her handbag, in the act of putting on lipstick. “I want to hit the shops on Pearl Street.”
Austin opened the back door for them and saw Bob and Kendra sitting on the bench under the aspens—and holding hands. Though Kendra hadn’t yet moved back in with her husband, Austin was pretty sure the two of them would make a go of it again. What had happened to Lexi seemed to have cut through their bullshit.
They got to their feet and walked toward the house, hand in hand.
“How long you kids planning on being out?” her father asked.
“I don’t know—a couple of hours.” Lexi stopped, turned on her crutches to face her dad. “It’s an hour to Boulder and back again, plus they want to take X-rays. I have no idea how long we’ll have to wait. Brit’s going to shop.”
“So a couple of hours then?”
Kendra leaned in, lowered her. “We’re good, honey. You can’t last that long.”
Bob grinned, and the two of them hurried into the inn.