Hearth Stone

by Lois Greiman

  “Way to go, Soph,” Dickenson said and gave her a fist bump.

  The girl shrugged, pretty face smug. “It’s a gift.”

  “And a curse,” Em added grumpily. “Hey, Ty.”

  Sydney glanced toward the door. The boy who entered had the angular build of a teenager and the solemn eyes of an ancient. He nodded his shaggy head silently and took a seat across from Sophie. Their gazes met for one fleeting instant, then snapped hotly away.

  Dickenson raised his brows at Sydney as if sharing a little-known secret about young love.

  “How’s Angel?” he asked.

  The boy lifted a shoulder that was leaning hard toward manhood. “Hungry.”

  “If that mare eats any more, we’re going to have to make the barn aisles wider.”

  “Like you should talk,” Emily muttered.

  The front door creaked and in a moment Casie Carmichael entered the room. Still shedding her well-worn outdoor clothes, the Lazy’s owner was tall and lean, with nondescript hair and unspectacular features. She did not, to Sydney’s way of thinking, possess a single outstanding physical characteristic. So why did both males watch her every move as if she might, at any given moment, yank a rabbit out of a hat?

  “Morning,” she said.

  Emily, still apparently peeved about the hundred-pancakes wager, wordlessly pressed a cup of coffee into her hands.

  Casie murmured her thanks and settled her gaze on Colt. “I can’t believe you beat me in again.”

  “Em’s making Bacon Bake.” His tone suggested the casserole held the secrets of the universe.

  “You didn’t have no trouble out there, did you?” Tyler’s eyes, always solemn, looked as worried as a hound’s.

  “No trouble.” Casie cast a maternal smile over the rim of her coffee cup, though apparently there were no familial bonds between her and Tyler, either. “But we do have three new lambs.”

  “Already?”

  “I would have checked the ewes,” Colt said. “But …”

  “… there’s Bacon Bake,” Sophie finished for him. He chuckled as he pulled out a chair for his fiancée.

  Emily nestled a basket of steaming biscuits between two mismatched plates. “I suppose the lambs are going to start coming for reals any time now.”

  “Like darts from a blowgun.”

  “I’ll take the night shift,” Tyler said.

  “Don’t you have an essay due?” Casie set her mug on the table before pulling the baby into her arms and settling into a chair.

  “For Mrs. Trembly’s class?” Colt asked, and taking the adjacent seat, poured milk into her glass. It had the consistency and hue of fresh whipping cream.

  Ty nodded and Colt shivered.

  “Holy sh …” He paused, cast a wary eye in Casie’s direction, and let the expletive die on his tongue. “Listen, I’ll take night duty. What’s a couple hundred sheep compared to Terrible Trembly? You just make sure you don’t piss her off. She’s been gunning for me for more than a decade.”

  “What’d you do?” Emily asked and set a bubbling casserole beside the crock of preserves.

  “Nothing,” Colt said, and slathering butter onto a biscuit, slipped it almost surreptitiously onto Casie’s plate.

  His fiancée’s expression was an exasperated meld of gratitude and amusement. “Except glue her chair to the floor.”

  “Well, there was that. Help yourself, Syd,” Colt said and indicated the Bacon Bake.

  She took a modest serving and turned the handle of the spatula toward Sophie, who wasn’t, she noticed, quite so cautious about portions.

  “And hide her syllabus,” Casie added.

  Colt grinned and dished the entrée onto both of their plates.

  Casie sighed. “And turn chickens loose in her classroom.”

  “That was probably my best …” he began, but one glance at Casie made him clear his throat and taste his breakfast. After the first bite, he cast a dreamy glance at the cook and thumped a fist against his chest as if the emotions there were too much to express in words.

  Emily rolled her eyes as she lifted the baby from Casie’s arms, but didn’t quite manage to hide her grateful smile behind the child’s buoyant curls.

  Quiet settled in for a moment, broken only by the sound of clinking flatware and contented sighs. Sydney sampled a biscuit. It was unreasonably tasty, possibly because it consisted of approximately five hundred fat grams per serving.

  Colt was the first to break the silence. “How’s that palomino doing, Soph?”

  The girl’s milk mustache looked ad-campaign perfect beneath her polished features. “At riding or driving?”

  “I don’t know.” He turned toward Sydney and raised his brows at her sparsely filled plate, but didn’t broach the subject. “Which do you prefer, Syd? Saddles or carriages?”

  “What?” She felt the muscles tighten like winched ropes across her shoulders and back.

  “Horses,” he said. “You do ride, don’t you?”

  “No!” The word darted from her lips. She forced a smile, and abandoning the half-finished biscuit, pushed her hands beneath the table. She had been warned against stressing her still-knitting femur and fragile spine. But no one had said she wouldn’t want to ride. That her hands would shake and her heart pound at the very thought of doing what had once made her life worth living. “I just came to relax.” She tapped her thigh with a restless index finger. “I enjoy hiking.” Walking was, in fact, highly recommended to hasten her rehabilitation. “I don’t ride.”

  “Well …” Colt polished off a rhubarb-spread biscuit and reached for another. “We can fix that.” He cut his gaze toward Sophie. “You’ve got some time for a lesson, don’t you?”

  Sydney entwined her fingers and felt sweat prickle her hairline. “That won’t be necessary.” The words sounded prissy and arctic cold against the farmhouse’s cozy bonhomie. The room went quiet. It was Ty’s muted voice that interrupted the silence.

  “Soph’s a real good teacher.” The boy’s tone was strangely soothing, as if he not only sensed her reluctance but understood her fear. “And you could ride Angel if you want. She maybe ain’t as pretty as the palomino, but pretty don’t pay no bills.”

  Casie’s gaze landed softly on the boy. Colt pointed at him with a fork.

  “Now there’s an offer,” he said. “Ty loves that mare more than …” He skipped his attention to the teenage girl across the table from him. Their gazes met before she snapped hers away with a disapproving scowl. “More than most,” he finished and grinned.

  Sophie’s cheeks flushed prettily and Colt laughed again as if all was well. As if the world was good and right and unfettered joy waited just around the bend.

  But Sydney knew better. Unfettered joy was not for poor little rich girls like her. Good-hearted men with knockout grins did not cuddle her like precious treasure against their work-hardened chests. Wounded youngsters didn’t bask in her healing presence.

  Disaster struck at mind-numbing intervals, leaving her with a disappointed father and throbbing limbs. She pressed a palm against her thigh and tried to breathe through the memories.

  It was Emily’s rendition of “North to Alaska” that brought Sydney back to the present. Sung to a rap beat, it was punctuated with a spoon against the countertop and performed without so much as a nod to any recognizable tune. Sophie groaned, Ty cracked a captivating grin, and Colt catapulted into a ludicrous story about the correlation between barometric pressure and bucking bulls.

  And despite everything, their homey goodwill seeped slowly into Sydney’s bones like errant sunshine. As they talked and laughed and badgered, hope unfurled cautiously inside her battered soul.

  So what if Leonard Wellesley wasn’t going to be nominated for Father of the Year? So what if Grandmother bore a striking resemblance to Adolf Hitler, and David Albrook, her erstwhile fiancé, preferred the company of girls barely out of diapers?

  The others gathered around the Lazy’s battered table probably didn’t
come from perfect circumstances, either. Yet they had somehow forged this astounding warmth, this unheard-of contentment.

  So maybe … Sydney’s heart sped along in her chest. Her muscles trembled with anticipation. Maybe she could find the same thing. Maybe all she needed was a few hundred acres of South Dakota, a couple inspiring vistas, and a front porch.

  The blossom of hope opened wider.

  It was said that money couldn’t buy happiness, but so far as she knew, the theory had never been conclusively proven.

  Chapter 2

  “Hello again.” Philip Jaeger shared his daughter’s glossy good looks. Like Sophie, he was tall and well built. More importantly, he was a Realtor who knew the area. A Realtor, Sydney hoped, who would find her a home in the deep hills of South Dakota.

  Nerves jangled down her arms to her fingertips.

  “Good morning,” Sydney said and concentrated on moving smoothly from the Lazy’s graveled drive onto the step of his three-quarter-ton pickup truck. Her thigh complained, but she ignored the niggle of pain. Sunlight warmed her face and turned the world a hopeful shade of impending spring. “Where are we headed today?”

  “I thought we’d look at that property near Pringle first, then head over to Minnekahta.”

  “The place you e-mailed me about. The one with the brick silo?”

  “It’s got a house, too,” he said and gave her a winning smile.

  She tilted her regal head in a gesture that suggested she would reserve judgment on whether or not this particular structure deserved the title. They had seen more than a few that didn’t warrant such an optimistic nomenclature, but she felt hopeful about the silo.

  “Maybe it’s not quite as posh as what you’re accustomed to,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s not quite as posh as the silo,” she countered.

  He chuckled. “I almost bought a farm in California a few years back,” he offered.

  “Almost?” Sydney asked and thought that could be the title of her theme song. Almost won the World Cup. Almost qualified for the Olympics. Almost got married. But things were going to be different now. She could feel it in her still-mending bones.

  “When my ex and I were planning to get back together,” he said.

  She watched the country roll past. Long valleys sweeping up to red-rocked cliffs. Pines spearing toward the sapphire sky like ancient arrowheads. And peace. Everywhere she looked, there was that quiet peacefulness that spoke to some unknown place deep inside her.

  “Monica.” He pronounced the name with a long e sound and a fair amount of pain, she thought. Or maybe it was anger. Sometimes the two were almost indistinguishable. “Sophie’s mother.”

  In Sydney’s mind, she sat in her own kitchen in her own tidy little cottage. The broad bowed windows gave her a sweeping view of endless hills and far-flung valleys. Some might find it lonely, but not her. And not the openhearted people who would share her life. The dream man across from her had a cowboy’s compact body and a crooked grin. Someone cracked a joke. It might even have been her.

  “Here it is.”

  Jaeger’s words dragged her reluctantly back to the here and now.

  “Red Rock Road,” he said and turned right onto a narrow thoroughfare. “They say you shouldn’t get back together just for the kids. That it doesn’t work out.” He checked the notes he’d written on a steno pad in loose, sprawling letters.

  Outside the window, the land had become rougher, broken into sienna bluffs and soft-shadowed valleys. A small wooden bridge spanned the gravel road where a stream, swollen from melting snow and a thousand meandering rivulets, wound eastward. She powered down her window. Tranquility whispered in. The hustling water chuckled quietly. Each ripple glistened like a diamond.

  “I think this might be the place.” He stopped the car and lifted a map from his lap. “Guess it borders Wind Cave Park. And … yeah … this is the west boundary of—”

  But she didn’t hear the rest of his words, because she knew where she was. She was home.

  Chapter 3

  “You what?” Casie Carmichael’s tone was surprised.

  Emily’s was shocked. “You bought a ranch?”

  Sydney laughed and glanced at her Realtor’s daughter. But Sophie Jaeger seemed as uninformed as any of them. “I thought your father might have told you.”

  Sophie shook her head, unaware and unimpressed, it seemed. “Can you pass the beans?”

  Emily did so without taking her attention from Sydney. “For reals? A ranch.”

  “Eight hundred and fifty-seven acres.” Sydney could barely believe it herself. It had all happened so fast, but some things were meant to be. Tragedies could foster new beginnings. And she desperately needed just that. The papers were signed. The money distributed. She’d paid in full. There had been other options, Mr. Jaeger had said. Down payments, loans, mortgages that extended to the middle of the century. But she had no collateral, and there was another bid on the table. She had moved quickly out of necessity. Her father would be surprised at first—maybe even angry. But in the end he would applaud her decisiveness. She was sure of it. The fact that she had turned off her phone after the purchase had nothing to do with uncertainty. She just needed some time to think things through before discussing it with him.

  “Where at?” Casie asked.

  The door opened and closed. Colt stepped inside. “What’d I miss?”

  “Green bean casserole,” Sophie said.

  He took his usual spot at the table and reached for the dish the girl passed his way.

  “Sydney bought a ranch,” Casie said.

  “No kidding?” He scooped up some beans. “Here in the Hills?”

  “Forty miles west,” Sydney said and found it was almost impossible to suppress a childish giggle. Where on earth did that come from? She hadn’t giggled even when she was a child.

  Colt took an oat roll from the wooden bowl that was circulating. It glistened with a blush of butter. “What are your plans for it?”

  “Well … I want …” Solitude, happiness, peace, maybe even love. In short, she wanted what the residents of the Lazy had, what they shared in this humble little tumbledown shack, but the words sounded silly even to herself. “I was looking for an investment.”

  “So you’re not planning to live there?” Casie asked.

  “Not full time, certainly.”

  “There’s a house on the property?” Emily asked and handed scalloped potatoes off to Sophie.

  “You might call it that.” Sydney almost winced at the memory of the sorry buildings that occupied the acreage.

  “What would you call it?” Emily asked.

  “Prehistoric art?”

  Colt chuckled as he accepted the potatoes. “We’re very cutting-edge here in the Hills.”

  Sydney shifted her gaze back to her meal. “I’ll have to tear it down. Build new.” She sampled the beans. Some kind of fried onions were sprinkled across the top. They managed to be creamy, crunchy, and outrageously delicious all at once. “In fact, I was wondering if you might help me, Emily.” She added a scoop of potatoes to her plate and didn’t bother counting fat grams even though Grandmother had made it abundantly clear that overindulgence was meant for the masses. Like public displays of affection … and emotions of any kind. But Grandmother wasn’t here. Sydney felt a giddy little kick of freedom. Or was it nerves?

  “Help you with what?”

  “With the finishing touches, once it’s built. I’m told the bunkhouse is your brainchild.”

  “It was all her doing,” Casie said. Pride hummed in her voice like a beloved melody. How surreal would it be to have that kind of support. That kind of acceptance. The idea was mind-boggling. “She handled all the decorating and most of the refinishing. Those are even her photographs on the walls.”

  “It’s all very nice,” Sydney said and realized she meant it. At first, perhaps, the old chicken-coop-turned-living-quarters had seemed a little chintzy. A little cut-rate and shabby. But her viewpoint ha
d changed since her arrival. “I’d like to replicate that same rustic ambiance.”

  “Replicate?” Emily said.

  Colt chuckled. “Em doesn’t replicate anything,” he said. “If the counter looks like it spent a decade in the cattle yards, that’s because it spent a decade in the cattle yards.”

  “Really?”

  “ ’Fraid so.” Emily nodded.

  “Well …” Sydney lifted her milk; there seemed to be a dearth of mineral water imported from the Alps in these parts. “Here’s to cattle yards.”

  They raised their beverages in unison and clinked mismatched glasses. Sydney took a sip, blinked, and didn’t quite manage to refrain from coughing.

  “Are you okay?” Casie sounded concerned, Emily winced, and Colt laughed.

  “Some people think goat milk is an acquired taste.” Reaching out, he swatted her on the back with companionable ease. “We actually thought Soph was going to die of dehydration before she took a shine to it.”

  “And look at her now,” Emily quipped. “Begging to milk Bo every day of the week.”

  Sophie took another deep quaff of milk and shook her head. “I won fair and square.”

  The older girl scowled. “But you probably want to—”

  “I don’t.”

  “You didn’t bet her again,” Colt said and Emily erupted.

  “There were a dozen sausages! No lie! A full—” The girl’s harangue was interrupted by an ancient phone that hung near the stove.

  “I’ll get it,” Casie said, but Emily was already turning away, eyes bright with anticipation.

  “It’s probably Linc,” she announced. If she was trying to act nonchalant, she was light-years off the mark.

  “Linc?” Sydney asked and returned her glass gingerly to the table.

  “Bliss’s father,” Casie said. “He’s spending a few days with his family in Detroit.”