Confessions: He's the Rich BoyHe's My Soldier Boy

by Lisa Jackson

  It had been he, not her mother, who had been hurt when Carlie had turned her back on Gold Creek. He, who had in those first few months when she’d been starving in Manhattan, sent her checks, “a little something extra to help out,” though she knew he’d grumbled loudly and often about her decision to move to New York. He’d never liked the idea of her modeling, wearing scanty clothing and being photographed; he’d felt personally violated somehow. However, Weldon Surrett had offered a hefty shoulder when she’d needed to cry on one and then been baffled when she no longer reached for him.

  He hadn’t approved of her love for Ben. Years ago he’d warned her about both Powell boys. She’d ignored him and when, in the end, he’d been right, he’d never mentioned the fact. Of course, he hadn’t known that she’d been pregnant when she’d left Gold Creek. That little secret was hers and hers alone.

  Her father had been hurt badly enough when she’d gotten married on the spur of the moment but had tried his best to like his new son-in-law, though they’d met only once and Paul had been disagreeable. But Weldon hadn’t so much as said “I told you so” when the marriage had failed.

  Oh, Dad, don’t die, she thought desperately. She wasn’t done needing a father. For the past few months she’d convinced herself that she’d returned to Gold Creek to help him, when, she decided as she squinted through the drizzle on the windshield, it had been she who had needed help to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.

  One thing was certain. It was time she stopped running. Time to face her past. Time to mend fences. Time to start a new life. Time to tell her father she loved him and time to deal with the one loose end in her life, the one dangling thread that still had the ability to coil around and squeeze her heart: her feelings for Ben.

  But she couldn’t think of Ben now, not when her father was battling for his life. She drove the Cherokee into a spot near the emergency entrance, slid out of the Jeep and hunched her shoulders against the rain as she and her mother dashed across the puddles forming on the asphalt of the parking lot.

  On the third floor of the hospital, in a semiprivate room, Weldon Surrett lay in the bed, his face slightly ashen, the left side slack. He was sleeping and his breathing was labored.

  “Dad?” Carlie whispered, and he blinked his eyes open. It took him a second to focus before he smiled a little. “How are you?”

  “Still kickin’,” he replied though he coughed a little and his tongue seemed thick.

  “You gave us both a scare.”

  He chuckled and coughed again. “Keeps you on your toes.”

  “Sure does.” She grabbed his hand and held it tightly between her own. His grip was weak, but he was still the man who, singing in a deep baritone as he arrived home from work each evening, would scoop her up in his arms and swing her in the air. He’d smell of smoke and the outdoors and he would force her to sing along with him while her mother clucked her tongue and told them they were both mindless.

  “Don’t suppose you brought me a beer?”

  “Not this time.”

  “Smokes?” he asked hopefully.

  “The doctor would kill me, and I thought you gave those up years ago.”

  “Smokeless ain’t the same,” he said. “But I’ll take chew if ya got it.”

  “Like I always carry around a can of tobacco,” she said with a smile.

  “You should’ve today,” he managed to get out.

  “Don’t talk,” she said, still holding his hand. “You go back to sleep and we’ll stay with you awhile.”

  “Sorry I’m such lousy company.”

  Her throat clogged. “You’re good company, Dad. You always have been.”

  He squeezed her fingers before closing his eyes again and Carlie fought the hot sting of tears. “I love you, Daddy,” she whispered and though he didn’t open his eyes again, she felt him try to squeeze her hand a second time.

  They waited until he’d drifted off, then Carlie decided it was time she spoke to the doctor. Her parents had led her to believe that her father had suffered a “mild stroke,” which was stronger than the smaller ones he’d experienced. The doctors hoped that after a little recovery, some intensive physical therapy, new medication and a change in diet, he’d be able to resume most of his usual activities. But seeing her father looking so weak, as if he’d just walked a thousand miles, she knew better. And it scared the living daylights out of her.

  * * *

  BEN SAT AT the computer, the one luxury he’d afforded himself, and worked with the rough drawings Nadine had given him. At first she’d wanted to rebuild the cabin as it was, but Hayden and Ben, agreeing for the first time in years, had suggested that she’d need something a little more modern, with two bathrooms instead of one and a couple of bedrooms rather than a single. She could still keep the loft, but she’d have an expanded kitchen and a fireplace that served as a room divider so that it could be seen from both the kitchen/nook area as well as the living room.

  “Looks like I’m outnumbered,” she’d responded, with a slight trace of irritation in her voice.

  “It’s just more practical,” Ben had explained.

  “But I liked it the way it was.”

  “So did I.” Hayden had wrapped his arms around his wife’s waist and kissed her on the neck. “This will be essentially the same floor plan, but a little more modern.”

  “You can even have a laundry room,” Ben had quipped.

  “And a sewing room with enough space for your machine, a desk and—”

  “Okay, okay, already! I’m convinced,” she’d said with a smile. “Just as long as I get to design the room layout.”

  So here he was, struggling with her rough sketch, adjusting the size of rooms and placement of walls for duct work, support beams, plumbing, electrical wiring and taking into consideration the slope of the land, watershed and a million other things that would be required before the county would approve her plans.

  By noon he was stiff from sitting, so he drove into town to the Buckeye Restaurant and Lounge. The establishment hadn’t changed much in the years that he’d been away. The booths were still covered in a time-smoothed Naugahyde.

  “Ben Powell!” Tracy Niday, dressed in a gingham dress and brown apron, slid a plastic menu onto the table in front of him. “I heard you were back in town.”

  “You heard right.”

  “Just passing through?” she asked.

  “I think I’ll be sticking around for a while.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Please. Black.”

  He opened the menu as she hurried back to the kitchen. He’d known that Tracy was in town, of course; Nadine and his father had written him while he was in the service. She’d been nearly destroyed after Kevin had died. Three weeks later she’d dropped the bomb with a mind-numbing announcement that she was pregnant with Kevin’s baby. Ben had already left Gold Creek when Tracy had told his father the news.

  She’d given birth to a healthy baby boy eight months after Kevin had been buried. George had helped her out a little as her own family had nearly disowned her. Things were better now, or so Nadine had told him. Tracy worked at the bank during the week and put in a shift or two at the Buckeye on the weekends.

  She returned, flipped over his coffee cup and poured the coffee from a fat glass pot. “You know,” she said as she set the pot on the table and grabbed her pad, “Randy would love to meet you.”

  Randy was her son. His nephew. He felt a jab of guilt. “Sure. Anytime.”

  “You mean it?”

  “Give me a call.” He reached into his wallet and drew out a business card. “I’d like to see Kevin’s boy.”

  For a second he thought she might cry. Her brown eyes glistened and she cleared her throat before taking his order and moving on to wait on the next booth.

  Tracy had never married, though, according to Nadine she’d dated several men seriously. She’d spent the past ten years taking care of her boy and trying to better herself. She was pretty, one
of those kind of women who seemed to get more good-looking as the years passed.

  She returned to Ben’s table, talked with him, laughing and joking, smiling a little more than she did with the other patrons as she served him a ham sandwich, potato salad and a crisp dill pickle.

  “Don’t make yourself scarce,” she said when he’d taken the final swallow from a coffee cup she seemed determined to keep filled.

  “I won’t.” He left her a decent tip and waved as he walked out the door. A weak winter sun was trying to break through the clouds and the puddles of water, left over from the rain, shimmered in the pale light. He climbed into his pickup and drove to the veterinary clinic where he was told that the shepherd, though dehydrated and suffering from malnutrition, was on the mend. The hole in his belly was probably compliments of a fight with another dog or a wild animal and though the beast had lost a lot of blood, he would survive.

  “I’ve called around,” Dr. Vance said as he rubbed the lenses of his glasses with the tail of his lab coat. “None of the shelters or other vets have any anxious owners looking for their pets. I even checked with the police department. He’s got a collar, but no license, so there’s no way of knowin’ where he comes from.” He patted the groggy animal on the head. “But my guess is that the dog is a purebred and someone’s taken care of him. He’s been neutered and had his teeth cleaned within the last year, and look at this—” he showed him the dog’s feet

  “—his toenails have been clipped, fairly recently, so I don’t think there’s a worry of rabies, though I’d inoculate him.”

  “If I decide to keep him.”

  The round vet smiled, showing off a gold tooth that winked in the fluorescent lights dangling from the ceiling. “You’ve got yourself a hefty bill here for a dog you’re gonna turn loose on the streets.” Again he patted the shepherd and the dog yawned. “Besides, every bachelor needs a dog. Someone to come home and talk to. Believe me, a dog’s better than a wife. This here shepherd won’t talk back.”

  “I heard that,” Lorna, the doctor’s wife and assistant, called from the back room.

  “Listenin’ in again?” he yelled back at her.

  “Hard not to overhear you griping.”

  Dr. Vance rolled his eyes and mouthed, “Women!” as if that said it all.

  Ben agreed to have the dog vaccinated, then paid his bill. It took most of his patience not to be offended when the shepherd growled at him. “Okay, Attila,” he said, leading the animal outside and to his truck, “if you so much as snarl at me while I’m driving, I’m letting you off right then and there. You’re history.” The dog snorted as Ben helped him onto the sagging bench seat, but he didn’t bare his teeth, nor did he try to bite, which Ben decided, was an improvement over the day Ben had first found him.

  “Just for the record,” he said, as if the beast could understand him, “I don’t want a dog.”

  Settling behind the steering wheel, Ben thought of Dr. Vance’s words of wisdom about marriage. Vance was probably kidding; he’d been married forever.

  Ben had already decided he needed a wife—but not Carlie Surrett. Yet, just at the thought of her clear blue eyes, lustrous black hair and intelligent smile, his gut tightened.

  He wanted her. It was that simple. And though he could deny it to himself a thousand times, he had to admit the truth. “Damn it all,” he muttered, slapping on the radio. The dog let out a low growl of disapproval, which Ben ignored.

  His house, a rental, was located on the outskirts of town. Once inside, he offered the dog food and water, then left him on a blanket in the laundry room. He had to meet some of the men who were going to clean the debris from Nadine’s lot, then he had to do a little work over at the Hunter Victorian. He’d figure out what to do about the dog a little later.

  As for Carlie—God only knew what he’d do about her.

  * * *

  CARLIE WAS BONE weary. The past couple of nights she’d spent hours at the hospital with her father or talking with the doctors who attended him. Though Weldon Surrett had suffered a mild stroke, he would recover. His speech had already improved and he had partial use of his left hand and arm. He was frustrated and cranky, but if he changed his lifestyle, gave up high-cholesterol food, avoided cigarettes and kept active, the prognosis was encouraging.

  However, he was stuck with months of physical therapy. He would eventually be released from the hospital, but he wouldn’t be able to work at any kind of strenuous labor for a long, long while.

  He was too old to retrain for a desk job, and even if he were a younger man, he would never be happy cooped up inside, shuffling papers, filing and working with figures.

  It looked as if he would have to retire early, as Thomas Fitzpatrick had suggested, and hope that whatever savings he and his wife had accumulated over the years would be enough to get them through. Thelma would still work of course, and Carlie intended to help out, though her father had been adamantly against the suggestion. Eventually, he’d collect Social Security, but those checks were still a few years away.

  “We’ll manage,” he’d said from his hospital bed.

  “But I can help—”

  “This is my problem, Carlie, and I’ll handle it. Now don’t you say a word to your mother or go getting her upset. We’ve made it through rough times before, we can do it again.”

  Reluctantly Carlie had dropped the argument when she’d seen the determined set of his jaw. Any further discussion would only have made him angrier and more upset and might have brought on another attack.

  Now her stomach grumbled at her as she walked through the foyer to her apartment and noticed that the baseboards had been stripped from the walls. Mrs. Hunter, Carlie’s landlady, had told her that she was going to renovate the old place in hopes of selling out. She’d even approached Carlie about buying the old Victorian house on the hill.

  At the time, Carlie hadn’t been sure she wanted to stay in Gold Creek; now, with her father ill, she’d decided to stay, at least for a while. She’d seen a lot of the world and was surprised at the feeling of coming home she’d experienced upon returning to this cozy little town, a town she’d once left without a backward glance.

  “Well, hello there!” Mrs. Hunter opened the door to her apartment to walk into the vestibule. She was dressed in a raincoat and carried a floral umbrella of purple and pink. “I thought you were my ride down to the center,” she said, peering out one of the tall leaded-glass windows that flanked the front door. “Smorgasbord tonight, you know.”

  “You’ll have a good time.”

  “I hope so. Last time the food was overcooked, you know, tasted like shoe leather, but the company’s usually good. Let’s just hope Leo Phelps doesn’t drag out his harmonica. Why they let him play after dinner, when everyone else wants to get on with cards or bingo, I’ll never know.” She pulled a plastic bonnet from her behemoth of a bag and spread it over her newly permed gray curls. “Oh, here they are now. By the way, the workmen are still here, probably just finishing up, so if you run across a handsome man in your room...” She let the sentence trail off and laughed.

  “I’ll know what to do,” Carlie teased as Mrs. Hunter walked onto the porch and closed the door behind her.

  Still smiling to herself, Carlie gathered her mail and started up the stairs. She lived on the third floor, the “crow’s nest” Mrs. Hunter called it, and Carlie had come to love her apartment. The turret, where she kept her desk, had nearly a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view, and the old wooden floors, and hand-carved window frames held a charm that she’d found lacking in more modern apartments. Running her fingers along the time-worn rail, she hiked her way up the steep stairs and told herself that the climb would keep her in shape. There were drawbacks to living here—the heating and cooling systems were ancient, the windows rattled and she’d seen more than one mouse sharing her living quarters, but she still loved her tiny rooms tucked high in the eaves of the old house.

  On the landing, she stepped over an electrical
cord strung across the hall before it snaked through her front door. “Hello?” she called, not wanting to scare the workman as she entered.

  Ben stood near one of the windows, his hip thrown out, his arms crossed over his chest.

  Her heart missed a beat and she stopped dead in her tracks.

  A tool belt was slung low over his hips and the sleeves of his work shirt were rolled over his forearms displaying tanned skin dusted with dark hair.

  “Well, Carlie,” he said with a brazen smile that touched a dark corner of her heart. “I wondered when you’d show up.”

  Chapter Seven

  CARLIE COULDN’T BELIEVE her eyes. Ben? Ben was the contractor—the workman who was going to be walking in and out of the house, with his own set of keys, his own set of rules and his own damned swagger? She felt suddenly violated and insecure. The fact that he was in her apartment, her private sanctuary, made her blood boil. After the way he’d treated her, he was the last person she wanted prowling about her home. Let the windows rattle. Let the faucet drip. Let the damned roof leak, but for God’s sake, never let Ben Powell in here. “What’re you doing here?” she demanded as he placed a screwdriver to her window frame and played with the pulleys in the old casing.

  “What does it look like?”

  She ground her teeth in frustration. “I know about the work that has to be done, I just don’t understand why you had to do it!”

  “I got the job.” He grimaced a little as the rope slid between his fingers and the window dropped suddenly. With a grunt, he shoved the old pane up again and tightened the screw.

  “But you’re not living here, are you?” she asked, her world suddenly tilting as she remembered the empty studio apartment on the first floor that Mrs. Hunter had wanted to rent. Mrs. Hunter had mentioned that she might trade the rent for work around the house.... Oh, no! He couldn’t live here—no way, no how! This small set of rooms was her private place, her shelter! She wasn’t going to share it with the one man who had the ability to wound her.

  “I’d be moving in tomorrow if your landlady had her way.” He shoved his screwdriver back into his tool belt and his eyes glinted a bit. “However, so far I’ve resisted.”