by Leslie North
“It’s nothing, Carson, not really. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know you do, brother. I’m sorry about that. I wish I could get there sooner. Honest to God, I do. Do you need me to—?”
"No," Trevor interrupted quickly. He wanted to kick himself for saying anything in the first place. It wasn't like him to complain, and besides, it wasn't like anyone had forced him into taking this particular bullet. Of the three of them, he lived closest. He also had Frank Hoffman, who Trevor was convinced must be the best, most trustworthy foreman in all of Montana. While it wasn't easy to make his business work from a different town, it was a whole lot easier for him to uproot his life at the drop of a hat than it would be for Carson or Randy. Come to think of it, Trevor had basically formed a practice of making his life easy to move at a moment's notice, although he hadn't fully realized that was what he'd been doing until now. He certainly hadn't imagined he’d use the advantage such mobility gave him to come back home.
"Seriously, Trev, I can be there tomorrow, if need be," Carson said, his voice hoarse with guilt. "If things are getting to be too much, all you have to do is say the word."
“Nah, it’s nothing like that. You want to know the truth?”
"I don't know—do I?" Carson asked. He was laughing again, but Trevor could hear the worry behind the mirth.
“Sure, you do. If you want to know what’s really getting to me, it’s the food.”
“The food?! Are you for real right now?”
“As real as a man can be,” Trevor affirmed, grimacing at the mere thought of what had passed for supper on the ranch these past couple days. It was almost enough to make a man want to learn how to cook.
Not quite, but almost.
“But Mrs. Cameron always did a great job with the meals!” Carson protested, sounding almost offended on the older woman’s behalf. “Isn’t she around anymore?”
Trevor suppressed a sigh. "No, she's not. Apparently, it's been her daughter, Lacey, for a couple years now. Lacey's mom quit to help look after her grandmother full time."
“Lacey,” Carson mused, “yeah, I think I remember her. Shy little thing, right?”
“If you say so.”
“So what’s the deal? She not living up to the Carson women’s culinary legacy?” Carson asked with a chuckle.
"Nah, it's nothing like that. Her cooking's top-notch. The problem is the woman she's got coming in to replace her. She's been trying to train this lady, but I'm not sure there's anything to be done.” He shook his head, and his grip tightened momentarily on the phone. “I think I'm going to have to put my foot down on this. If one of us is going to be taking the ranch on, we've got to have people we can work with."
Carson’s voice rang through the phone, full of confidence. “It’s your call, brother. I’ll second whatever you want to do. I—”
But Trevor stopped listening halfway through, missing a large part of whatever else Carson had to say on the matter. The sound of the barn door opening had caught his attention, and when he looked up, his cousin Penny was ducking her head in at the doorway. She didn’t look like she had any intention of coming all the way inside, but she didn’t need to for Trevor to feel the shock of what the years had done to the woman.
Penny was Carson's age, and once upon a time, she had been around the McCall family enough that the brothers had thought of her as more of a sister than a cousin. She had always been something of a tomboy, a rough-and-tumble sort, and she had taken it hard when Trevor had moved away and decided not to come around the ranch anymore. Letting go of her friendship was one of the parts he regretted about the way he had handled things, and that went double now.
She looked like a shadow of the spunky, spirited cousin he remembered. Even across the dim barn, he could see dark circles under her eyes. Her face was unnaturally pale and gaunt, the hair hanging in her face lank and clearly in need of a wash. She looked like she'd been through hell and back since he'd seen her last, no two ways around it.
Trevor's stomach gave a lurch, and he pulled the phone away from his ear, Carson still talking, oblivious to the change. "Hey, cuz," he croaked, striving for a normal voice and falling flat. "I didn't know you were coming around. Give me a second, okay?"
Penny gave a half wave. “Sure, no hurry. I just wanted to poke my head in and say hi. It’s good to see you after all this time. You look good, Trev. You really do.”
“Th-thanks,” he stammered. “So do you.”
Penny smiled sadly. They both knew this last part was a lie. She flapped her hand in another wave and pointed back outside, presumably toward the house. Trevor glanced at his phone, and when he looked up again, Penny was shaking her head.
“Seriously, Trev. No need to rush. I need to take off, actually. I’ve got somewhere I need to be,” she said, her voice hoarse and sharp around the edges. “Don’t worry, though. We’ve got plenty of time. I’ll see you around, okay?”
“Okay,” he echoed, although he was speaking to her back. It looked to him like she couldn’t get away fast enough, and honestly, he didn’t blame her. He’d made an effort, Lord knew he’d tried, but there was no way she hadn’t been able to see the shock on his face. Odds were good that he’d hurt her feelings. He was going to have to make up for that later, although he wasn’t sure quite how.
“Trevor! Hey, man, are you listening to me?”
“Sure, little brother, I’m listening. You go right on ahead.”
The two of them continued to talk for another ten minutes or so, during which time Trevor heard a car start up outside and drive away. From the sound, it was moving fast, too—he could hear the gravel from the road flying up and clanging against the car’s undercarriage.
Trevor winced. It sounded like Penny was in a hell of a hurry to get away from the McCall ranch—probably, to get away from him. He was going to need to make amends, for sure, and the idea put him in even more of a sour mood than he’d been in before. He was starting to feel like everything that could go wrong had gone wrong ever since he’d come back home. The idea of lasting through a full year of this made him want to hit something. Hard.
“Hey, Carson?” he interrupted, rubbing his temple with his free hand. To top everything off, he felt a headache threatening.
"Talk to me," Carson said, a favorite catchphrase from their younger years.
"I'm going to have to let you go, if you don't mind. I feel a migraine coming on, and I'd like to nip it in the bud if I can."
“Say no more, brother. I hope you get to feeling better. And hey, you call me anytime, all right? I’m here for you. Pretty soon, I’m going to be there with you, too.”
“Sounds good.” Trevor hung up the phone and sighed with relief. The headache was looming large, but he thought he might still have time to head it off at the pass. A long, hot shower and a couple beers were likely to do the trick, and he thought he had enough time to get those in before Lacey arrived for the day. At least she had given her replacement, Mrs. Beyers, a night off from her training. Beyers would be leaving within the hour, which suited Trevor just fine. He was going to have to talk to Lacey about that woman. If she wanted to quit, that was her business, but she was going to have to keep looking for somebody to fill her shoes. Mrs. Beyers wasn't going to do the trick.
He slipped out of the barn after a quick once-over to make sure everything was in its proper place. Then he headed toward the house, squinting against the setting sun. He was so lost in his own thoughts that he almost walked right into the little girl sitting on the front porch steps, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders to protect her from the late March chill. He jumped back, yowling loudly enough to scare the girl and set her crying.
“What in the—?” Trevor leaned forward, bracing his hands on his knees and breathing hard. Noticing a piece of paper bearing a crude, hurried scrawl pinned to the girl’s jacket, he reached out and removed it gently.
When he saw what was written there, he wanted to start crying himself
.
5
“No. This can’t be happening. It can’t. Just, no.”
Lacey wasn't sure how many times she'd spoken the words, or some variation of them, in the last fifteen minutes or so. It had to be a lot. She was pretty sure that if anybody else had been around, they would have said she sounded like a broken record. A crazy broken record at that.
Her mother had told her for as long as she could remember not to do anything that drew too much attention to herself. Don’t dress in anything flashy or provocative. Don’t speak too loudly or make too many jokes. Certainly don’t talk to yourself! She had taken the lessons to heart, maybe learned them a little too well. At the moment, though, talking out loud to an empty car felt like the least of her problems.
“And now I get to go hang out with Mr. Too-Big-for-his-Britches,” she hissed.
Not that she had a real problem with Trevor, per se, but what she wanted to be doing was heading straight to her bed and breakfast to take care of what sounded like a bigger mess than she could ever have imagined.
She had just had a call from her friend, Caroline, who had informed her that the contractor had abandoned ship. Lacey had paid him up front for all the materials he would need as well as for half of his labor, something he had assured her was standard. Instead of doing the job, he had taken off and not shown up at the bed and breakfast again.
As soon as Lacey had gotten off the phone with Caroline, she had called the man and discovered that his phone number was no longer working. She had no way to contact him now and no way to recoup her losses.
“Brave face,” she whispered as she pulled up next to Trevor’s truck. “That’s all you’ve got to do. Put on a brave face and get through this so you can get through the next thing.”
She climbed out of the dilapidated Jeep she had saved six years for and took a deep, shaky breath. The last thing she wanted to do now was play nice with Trevor, and unfortunately, she didn't even have Mrs. Beyers to act as a buffer tonight. She half wished she could call in sick, but it would be less than convincing while standing outside of his house.
As if to punctuate the point, the screen door banged open, and Trevor came striding out onto the porch. He looked around wildly, his eyes wide with something that looked a whole lot like fear to Lacey's untrained eye. He was without his customary cowboy hat, and his thick, almost black hair stood up in all different directions. As she watched, he ran his hand through it again, making the sticking up parts even worse. Something about the look of him made her think of when they were still children and Trevor wasn't getting his way. It almost made her feel sorry for him, except that at the moment, her own worries were about the only thing she had room to be sorry for.
“Lacey! Thank God. I thought you were never going to get here,” he said when he caught sight of her, his eyes growing wider still.
"Never get here? What are you talking about, Trevor? I'm five minutes early," she answered, more defensively than she’d meant to. She may or may not have been crying some on the drive, and she didn't want him to see her reddened eyes or any tear tracks she’d missed in wiping them away and ask her what was wrong. It wasn't something she was ready to talk about. She wasn't sure she would ever be ready to talk about it with Trevor McCall.
"Right, okay," he said distractedly, waving the comment off with an air of impatience that made her bristle all over. "You're right, but I need you to come with me all the same. I've got a situation here. A big one."
Without waiting to see if she would follow, Trevor turned back toward the house, hovering in the open doorway and letting all the heat out instead of going inside. His bizarre behavior was completely unlike what she had come to expect of him in their short time together as adults. Nevertheless, the more closely she watched him, the surer she felt that something had really and truly shocked him. She took another deep breath, willed her heartbeat to slow to something that could pass as a normal rate, and followed after him.
"Maybe it will do me some good," she whispered to herself as she hurried up the porch stairs. The moment she thought about her own awful predicament, though, fresh tears sprang up in her eyes, and she had to shake her head—as if that would be enough to clear it.
When she looked up again, Trevor was looking at her thoughtfully. “What is it?” he asked brusquely. One thing she had noticed about him was that he almost never beat around the bush. She vaguely remembered being impressed by that as a little girl. Now, she only wished he’d pretend not to notice she was upset, like most normal adult acquaintances would.
“Nothing,” she answered quickly and, she hoped, with enough finality to discourage further questioning. “Besides, aren’t you the one who’s got a problem? Let’s just focus on that, shall we?”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” he said, voice suddenly shaky. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he spoke, making it look like his entire body was vibrating with the nervous energy he was giving off. Beneath his worn work boots, the floorboards of the porch creaked unhappily.
“Why don’t you tell me what it is, and we’ll see if we can’t handle it, whatever it is,” Lacey said in her best soothing tones, trying not to let herself shiver. Even though the temperatures were rising, she didn’t really consider the end of March to be appropriate porch weather. If that was where he was comfortable talking, though, that was where they would stay.
“Well, for starters, it’s not an ‘it.’ It’s a her, and if you’ve got a solution for this, I’ll eat my hat.”
“Um, if this is some kind of relationship problem—” Lacey started to say in disgust.
“No! Come on, are you kidding me? You think I would get this worked up over a chick? This is about my cousin, Penny.”
“Okay, what about her?” Lacey asked pointedly. She could feel herself starting to lose patience despite her best efforts. If Trevor didn’t cut to the chase, and soon, she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to keep it together. And it didn’t help matters that Penny had never been her favorite person to begin with.
"Turns out, she's got a little girl. I never knew she was pregnant, but now—she's got a little girl."
"Look, Trevor is there—?" Lacey started, the first signs of annoyance starting to show through in her voice.
"She's sitting in my living room, Lacey," he broke in, his voice strangled with panic. "Penny showed up here unannounced while I was in the barn, and next thing I know, I head back to the house, and there's this four-year-old little girl sitting on my porch with a note pinned to the front of her jacket."
“A note? What does that mean?” Lacey asked uncertainly. She wasn’t sure if it was what he was telling her or the stress in his voice, but either way, she was starting to feel some of Trevor’s fear. Things like that were contagious.
“Here, take a look at it yourself, why don’t you? Penny made it all pretty freaking clear, I’ll give her that. Guess she wanted to make sure things were understood in no uncertain terms.”
Trevor pulled a crumpled paper from the pocket of his jeans and thrust it in her direction. It was torn on the edges and sweat-stained as if he'd been running his fingers over it again and again—as if that could change what the note said.
As Lacey read, her eyes grew wide and her mouth dropped open. This was the kind of thing that happened in movies, not in real life. She had never even heard of something like this before, and yet, when her eyes flew back to Trevor's face, he was nodding.
"I know," he said, throwing his hands up in exasperation. "What am I supposed to do with that? Wrote it on a freaking slip of Hello Kitty notepad paper. Can't take care of her own little girl, so she drops her off on my doorstep."
“But is this even legal?” Lacey asked carefully, reading through the note again. “Somebody can just give her kid away?”
“I don’t know, Lacey!” Trevor hissed, clearly wanting to yell but reining it in as he began pacing back and forth on the porch. “I don’t have the first clue about the law, okay? All I know is,
my cousin, who I haven’t seen in years, just wrote a letter making me her kid’s guardian.”
“Trevor—”
“Oh, and just in case you didn’t know this already, which I’m pretty sure you do, I don’t have the first clue how to be a parent. Not the first clue!”
“Trevor,” Lacey said again, more forcefully this time. “You’re getting loud. She’s going to hear you.”
“Right,” he snapped. Then, more slowly, he added, “No, you’re right.” He took a deep breath, shut his eyes, and let the breath back out. When he looked at her again, she could see that he was holding on to himself by a thin thread.
He was holding on, though. She had to hand it to him. Also, in a weird way, his crisis was helping her somewhat. It was good to have something to take her mind off her own troubles, to have something to try and do.
“Tell me what I can do for you, Trevor. How can I help?” she asked.
“Yeah, okay,” he sighed. “I’m glad you brought that up. We’ve got another little problem. Not as big as the first one.” He paused, then added, “Pretty much related to the first one, actually.”
“Tell me, Trevor,” she encouraged.
"It's Mrs. Beyers. I talked to her about Jade. That's her name—Penny's girl. I talked to Mrs. Beyers about taking on the role of nanny, on top of her other duties, and she up and quit. Said children aren't her thing and walked out. She must really hate kids, is all I've got to say."
Lacey’s heart was beating so fast and loud that she could feel it in her eardrums, threatening to drown everything else out. “What?! Mrs. Beyers quit? That’s impossible! How are we going to find somebody to replace her this quick?!” It was too much. The mess with the contractor, Jade, and now Mrs. Beyers. Lacey wasn’t a problem solver. She wasn’t the one to step up and put out these kinds of fires.
Trevor was looking at her as if she had gone and lost her mind. “Calm down, Lacey. Now you’re the one who’s yelling. It’ll just have to take a little longer, is all. Truth be told, Mrs. Beyers wasn’t working out. I was going to talk to you about replacing her, regardless.”