After the Fall: An Inspirational Western Romance (Gold Valley Romance Book 2)

by Liz Isaacson

  “Yeah,” she said. “My mom’s going to have a baby.”

  “Mari,” Rose admonished as Norah’s eyes flew to the financial director at Silver Creek. She latched her hand in Tom’s and beamed at him. “I guess it’s not a secret anymore.”

  “Well, you tell Mari something, and you can’t expect it to stay under wraps.” The cowboy chuckled, and Norah smiled with them.

  “Congratulations.” She’d never given any thought to having a family, but one look at Sterling standing down the fence line, and suddenly all she could think about was having a house full of his sons.

  Her own face heated as Tom helped Mari saddle a horse named Liquid Nitrogen. “Don’t hold so tight,” he told her. “Just because you’re mad about the baby—”

  “Not mad,” Mari said, but she held the reins with a death grip. “Ride.”

  “Go on, then.” Tom gestured for her to take the horse out to the arena. “Don’t run him too hard.” He watched her go, then stepped back to Rose’s side. “She’ll come around.”

  “You better go out there with her,” Rose said. “She might run away.”

  He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Nah, she’ll stay where she’s supposed to. Don’t let her upset you.” He strolled in the same direction Mari had gone, and Norah took the opportunity to head out too.

  “Nice to see you, Rose.” She glanced at Sterling. “You ready to go home?”

  “Oh, Sterling.” Rose stepped in between them. “Doctor Richards approved your donation.”

  Norah’s eyebrows practically flew off her face. “Donation?” escaped her lips.

  Sterling ignored her and thanked Rose. “I’m definitely ready to go home,” he said. “Mondays are so exhausting.”

  “I heard that,” Owen said as he came forward.

  “No, you didn’t.” Sterling threw him a grin and followed Norah out of the stable. He kept a respectable distance between them, and though Norah didn’t see anyone, she felt the weight of a thousand eyes on her and Sterling.

  Once in the safety of the car, she asked, “Donation?” again.

  “One of my boys needs his parents here this weekend. I asked Rose about making a donation for their airplane tickets.”

  Jealousy jumped through her. She’d needed someone like Sterling as a teen.

  You need him now, she thought, and her envy ebbed away. It had been eleven years since her own parents’ weekend, and she couldn’t carry that resentment along with everything else she currently shouldered.

  “Are you mad?” he asked as he took her hand in his.

  The tension left her body, seemingly flowing out of her through the hand that Sterling held. “No, not really.”

  “So we can go to dinner?”

  “You can’t do this every week,” she said sternly as she turned west, toward the tiny town of Starvation on the edge of Yellowstone National Park.

  “Of course I can.” He laughed, the sound bouncing around her small sedan.

  “No, you really can’t. I’m not going to let you send food to my brothers so we can go out.”

  “Well, they can’t eat mac and cheese all the time.”

  “Exactly. We can’t go out all the time.”

  “Norah.”

  She was sunk when he said her name so passionately, but she desperately tried to keep her face serious.

  “I just want to spend time with you.” He lifted her wrist to his lips, sending a zing of electricity through her veins. “Is that so wrong?”

  “No,” Norah said. “But yes. We’re not supposed to be dating.”

  “We’re not at work right now.”

  “I can’t lose my job.”

  “I’ll quit before that happens.”

  “But we need you at the center too.”

  “Can we just not worry about it?” Sterling sighed. “At least for tonight?”

  “Fine,” Norah said, but the worry needled her, a constant buzz in her mind that wouldn’t go away. She absolutely couldn’t lose her job, and she knew Dr. Richards was counting on Sterling to run the at-risk group in only a few weeks.

  She managed to soothe the anxiety in her gut with a Philly cheesesteak and the biggest Diet Coke Montana had to offer. And kissing Sterling under the stars drove out everything but the man holding her in his arms.

  A couple of weeks later, Norah finished her work for the day—tons of paperwork as she prepared to say good-bye to one of her favorite groups of girls—and didn’t have to drive Sterling back to the cabin. His brother had come to get him at lunch to take him to a doctor’s appointment in Missoula.

  She decided to swing by the building where Team Silver Bow lived, each girl sharing a room with another on the third floor. As she climbed the steps Norah hoped Sterling’s appointment went well. He’d be asking the doctor if he could drive, and since riding a horse had been going so well, Sterling was hopeful.

  Norah should be grateful too. Driving up the mountain twice a day—and back—had added a lot of miles on her car and extra minutes to her busy schedule. But in truth, she didn’t mind. She loved the time alone with Sterling, the conversation that didn’t center around teen addictions, the way he pressed her against the door that led to the garage and kissed her, kissed her, kissed her.

  Pushing him from her mind so she could focus on her girls, she knocked on the first door. Her group should be packing for their departure tomorrow afternoon, and Norah made it a habit to stop by and help each one the night before she left. Her counselor had done that for her, and the memory still reminded her that someone, at some time, had cared about her.

  “Hey,” she said when Natalie opened the door. “How’s the packing going?”

  “Great!” Natalie bounced back into the room, her perma-grin stuck in place. Norah borrowed from the girl’s enthusiasm, because packing night was always hard on her. She managed a smile before reaching for a shirt in a pile of clothes. “Who’s is this?”

  “Mine,” Felicia said, her voice thick. She sat on her bed, as still as though she’d been frozen.

  “Tell me about home,” Norah said as she folded.

  Silent tears tracked down Felicia’s cheeks, but after a few minutes, she began to talk. Norah listened, wishing she could wrap every one of her girls in a tight embrace and send them back out in the world with the reassurance that everything would turn out okay. But she couldn’t.

  After all, everything still hadn’t turned out okay for her.

  Sterling called while Norah was still in class. She saw the flashing indicator, saw his handsome face light up the screen, but she pushed the phone further into her backpack and concentrated on the lecture. With finals next week, she couldn’t afford to be distracted during the review.

  By the time the teacher finished and Norah escaped the classroom, he’d called twice more. As she walked toward her car, she swiped to call him back, her pulse palpitating. Maybe something had gone wrong at the doctor’s office. Maybe he couldn’t drive. Couldn’t ride.

  The line rang in her ear—and his ringtone sounded nearby. Norah shrugged it off as a coincidence—until the phone stopped ringing and he said, “Hey,” and the ringtone in the parking lot cut off at the same time.

  “Are you here?”

  “Standing next to your car.”

  She peered through the lot, finally making out his tall form next to her sedan a few rows over and way down the line.

  “How long have you been here?” She picked up her pace, wishing she had automatic locks so she could at least offer him a place out of the wind.

  “Only a few minutes. I had Rex drop me off here. I tried to call.”

  “I couldn’t answer. It was the last class before finals.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I was just about to text when you called.” His voice sounded in stereo, first through the line then through the streetlights.

  “I’m going to hang up now.”

  “Rude,” he teased. He added a chuckle to the word as she ended the call and stuffed her phone
in her backpack.

  She forced herself to walk instead of run. “Hey.” She arrived at the car a little breathless, and not only from the brisk walk.

  He slid his hands around her waist and brought her close. She leaned into him as he leaned against the car. “How’s your leg?”

  “Everything’s better when you’re here.” He leaned down and kissed her with the slow precision she’d come to expect from Sterling. The man knew how to accelerate and brake at the same time, how to put pressure on the edges and make a turn, how to draw her closer without scaring her.

  “Probably shouldn’t have done that in public,” he whispered. A grin pulled at his lips. “Couldn’t help myself.”

  Norah enjoyed the safety she felt within the circle of his arms, loved the warmth from his body seeping into hers, the scent of crisp, Montana air mixing with the leather of his jacket and the spiciness of his cologne.

  “Have you eaten?”

  She tucked herself against his chest. “It’s nine o’clock.” Besides, she didn’t want him buying her dinner every night. It had become a habit—one he didn’t seem to mind, but one that had started to grate against Norah’s conscience.

  “Ice cream then.”

  “It’s ten below zero.”

  “Well, I guess we can just stand here and kiss some more.” He traced his lips along her temple, letting them fall to her earlobe.

  Norah giggled, though a distinct tremor told her to take private things behind closed doors. “We can’t do that. Come on, I’ll drive you home.” She stepped away from him.

  “Can we at least stop for a soda or something?”

  She moved around the front of the car and unlocked her door so she could flip the locks. “You and your midnight sweets.”

  “I won’t be sleeping for hours anyway.” He slid into the car with her.

  “Oh, yeah? Why not?”

  “The doctor said I could drive.” Sterling took her hand in his and squeezed.

  “Sterling! That’s awesome news.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “No?” Norah wished the car would heat up faster, and she pressed the accelerator hard once she’d backed out. “Why no?”

  “I won’t get to ride to work with you anymore.” He cleared his throat. “I won’t get to see you at all anymore.”

  Norah didn’t like the dark tone of his voice, though the lost time with him weighed heavily on her as well. “We’ll still see each other.”

  “Oh, yeah? When?”

  “Well, since you’ve refused to stop sending food to my house on Monday nights, we’ll be able to go out then.”

  “In Starvation, or Kenedee Falls.”

  “It’s better than nothing.” Norah didn’t know how to reassure him. True, driving to remote towns where no one would see them dining had drawbacks. But it had perks too, like holding hands without the fear of someone seeing, or kissing over a shared brownie, as they had a few days ago in a tiny restaurant in an even tinier town.

  “Norah.”

  She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. She passed Silver Creek and headed up the mountain, her nerves writhing against her muscles.

  “The doctor said I can probably try snowboarding again.” He delivered his words in a cool, even tone.

  Norah’s anxiety skyrocketed. “Do you want to snowboard again?”

  He shrugged, and Norah refocused her attention out the windshield. Of course Sterling wanted to snowboard again. He’d been a gold medalist. A champion. His fall had been an accident—an accident that happened at the worst time, at the beginning of a promising career.

  If he had the chance to snowboard again, she knew he’d take it over babysitting teen boys who didn’t know how to tame their tempers and had gotten into trouble with weapons. She wasn’t sure what had become of his police job, but she knew it had been put on hold for snowboarding.

  With a sinking, hollow feeling driving through her core, Norah knew everything in Sterling’s life got put on hold for snowboarding.

  Including his job.

  His religion.

  His relationships.

  When she pulled into the cabin’s driveway, she didn’t open the garage and follow him inside like she normally would have.

  “You’re not coming in?” He turned toward her, his face half-lit by the motion-sensor bulbs along the garage.

  Norah didn’t know what to say, didn’t trust her voice not to crack and break even if she did. Didn’t matter what she said.

  Sterling would leave Gold Valley, the way all the men in Norah’s life had.

  11

  A tornado of emotions twisted inside Sterling. He’d disappeared inside his own mind on the way up the mountain, much the same way he had on the way home from Missoula. The news that he could drive, that he could ride horses, that he could get back on a snowboard should’ve elated him.

  And it did.

  Honestly, it did.

  But things seemed infinitely more complicated now too. He felt at war with himself, one half of himself urging him to stay in Gold Valley and see if things could go all the way with Norah, to focus on helping the at-risk boys he’d be getting on Monday, continue repairing his cracked relationship with God.

  All of those things had brought his life purpose over the past several weeks. Purpose when he’d had none. A reason to get up, get moving, get happy.

  And he was.

  Honest, he was.

  Happier than he’d been in a long time.

  But not complete, whispered through his mind again, just as it had on the long drive home from the doctor’s office.

  And now Norah wouldn’t come in. He really didn’t want to leave her when things between them weren’t perfect.

  “What’s going on in your mind?” he finally asked.

  She shook her head, a few errant curls bouncing as she steadfastly kept her chin turned away from him.

  “Norah.”

  “Stop saying my name like that.”

  “Like what?”

  She finally faced him, a fire in her eyes that felt hot and furious and hurt and fragile all at the same time. He’d seen this look before, not on her face, but his. And seeing it on Norah’s made his heart turn inside out.

  “Like you adore me,” she said. “It’s hard to figure out what’s true and what’s not when you talk like that.”

  “I do adore you.”

  She shook her head again. “So, I guess you’ll be moving back to Denver, then.”

  “Not for at least twelve weeks,” Sterling said, deciding on the spot. He still had his apartment in Denver. His gear stored there. His friends—though he wasn’t sure if he cared to see any of them again.

  “Probably longer,” he said. “Can’t really snowboard in Colorado in July.” He tried to make his tone nonchalant, like he totally didn’t care or even know if he’d return to snowboarding. But something about the sport called to him, the stories the media would run about his comeback, the allure of being someone again.

  Norah’s shoulders relaxed, and Sterling banished his traitorous thoughts. “Please come in,” he said, not above begging. After all, it had worked before.

  She reached up and pushed the button on the automatic opener, and the garage door slid up. Sterling’s heart seemed so heavy in his chest as she parked and killed the engine.

  He got out first and went around to be there when she finally emerged from the car. “Let’s not worry about what will happen in three months,” he said. “Or six. Or never. Okay?”

  She let him take her hand and lead her into the cabin. He took her past the kitchen, down the spiral staircase—which he could maneuver all by himself now—and to the couch in front of the fireplace in the basement.

  “Pick a movie,” he said. “I’ll make a fire and hot chocolate.”

  “It’s too late for a movie.” She stood and rubbed her arms as if cold, though she still wore her winter coat.

  He hated that she wouldn’t just sit down, wouldn’t relax. He shou
ld’ve known she’d react this way.

  You shouldn’t have told her about the snowboarding, he chastised himself.

  But he’d wanted to. Wanted to share everything about his life with her. Sterling recognized the importance of this—that he wanted to hash things over with Norah and no one else. Even when Rex had asked if he’d snowboard again, only annoyance had soared through Sterling.

  He’d watched five older brothers fall in love, and he recognized the signs within himself. But he also knew he wasn’t there yet. And he had no idea where Norah stood. Sure, she seemed to like kissing him, and she seemed genuinely upset about the prospect of him leaving Gold Valley in favor of snowboarding.

  He abandoned his plans to make hot chocolate and build a fire and hopefully snuggle up to Norah. He moved to stand in front of her.

  “Tell me what’s wrong.” He ran his hands up her arms and back down, linking his fingers in hers.

  She took a breath, her boxy shoulders lifting and falling too fast. “I don’t really know. I just feel….”

  Sterling peered at her, dipping his head to see her eyes as she ducked her chin to her chest. “Feel what?” He squeezed her fingers, hoping to reassure her that he was there, present, listening. That he cared.

  She raised her chin and met his eye. “I don’t see the point of having a relationship if you’re going to leave in twelve weeks. Or six months.” She dropped his hands. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Norah, I’m not either.”

  “But you could be.”

  He exhaled. “If we live on could be’s, we wouldn’t do anything.” Sterling paced back into the kitchen, turned, and tried to see her side. “I can train here in Gold Valley. I don’t have to go back to Denver.”

  “So you do want to snowboard again.” She wasn’t asking this time, and Sterling didn’t shrug.

  “Yes, Norah, I want to try snowboarding again. But,” he rushed to add, “I don’t have to leave Gold Valley to do it. There are plenty of mountains here.”

  She blinked at him, new hope entering her eyes. “What if you get hurt again?”

  “Then I build myself another nest of blankets and hope another beautiful woman breaks into my house.” He kicked a smile in her direction, desperate for her to smile and laugh—and then kiss him before she left.