A Stranger in the Family (Book 1, Bardville, Wyoming Trilogy)

by Patricia McLinn

  He’d done that to her.

  Finally, a pair of headlights sweeping through the window broke his trance. It was nearly midnight.

  Not bothering to change out of his clothes, he pushed his bags to one side and dropped onto the mattress, staring at the ceiling. Not thinking and not feeling. Just staring.

  He must have slept, because sunlight woke him— that and the insistent reminder from his stomach that he hadn’t eaten for nearly twenty-four hours. Like the computer and fax machine, his body consumed energy and demanded a source for more, even if his mind wasn’t working.

  Absently he supplied it at the tiny cement-block cafe across the highway.

  He returned to his room, sitting at the desk, doodling aimlessly on the backs of envelopes until a knock jerked the pencil across the paper in a harsh, startled line.

  Probably the maid.

  He flicked aside the curtain on his way to the door, then fumbled with the lock with suddenly clumsy fingers. The knob slipped from his hand so the door flung open with unnecessary force.

  Irene Weston didn’t seem to notice, smiling warmly as she walked in.

  “Afternoon, Boone. How’re you?”

  “Irene? What are you doing here?”

  “You have five nights left you’ve already paid for. I’m here to tell you to come back.”

  “It’s not that simple.” He dragged one hand through his hair. He felt as if he’d been saying that a lot lately. “Cambria—”

  “Cambria runs the bed-and-breakfast business, but she’s not the only member of this family with a say-so,” Irene pronounced calmly. “May I sit down?”

  “Of course.” He pulled the desk chair around for her, and perched on the edge of the bed.

  “Ah, I see you’ve been working.”

  Irene wasn’t looking at the computer and fax. She’d picked up the envelope with his doodles and studied it. When she laid it down, a corner of his mind noted with some astonishment that the aimless lines had taken the forms of buildings. A different version of the new cabin, a stylized barn, a rough sketch of a house of stone and log and glass.

  But most of his consciousness addressed a very different matter. He tried desperately to figure out what this visit meant. Had Cambria told Irene he was Pete’s biological father?

  “Did, uh, did Cambria tell you where I was going? Does she know you’re here, asking me to come back?”

  “No. No need to tell her, and no need to ask her for information. I have my sources in this county.” A hint of humor edged into Irene’s face. “And a few other counties, besides.”

  He tried to make sense of it, but he felt as if his brain had filled with dust and tumbleweed. “Somebody told you where I was?”

  “I asked around,” she amended placidly. “I thought, considering how Cambria doesn’t always think through everything she says, that you could likely do with someone to talk to.”

  “But I could have gone back to North Carolina—”

  She gave him a chiding look, though her voice remained gentle. “I don’t think so. I don’t know you near as well as I know Cambria, but you didn’t seem to me to be one to turn tail so easily. Especially not when it’s something important to you. And Cambria is important to you, isn’t she?”

  It was barely a question, and Boone’s head was spinning with trying to figure out how much Irene knew. But his answer came automatically. “Yes, she is.”

  “I’m glad.” Irene smiled, and for the first time in twenty-four hours a bit of hope curled loose inside Boone. “Love isn’t easy, especially not with someone as careful of her fences as Cambria. But behind the barbed wire, she has a heart that’s made for joy.”

  She leaned over and patted his knee. “Ted gave me a plaque once with a saying about the best kind of love being one that gives the person you love—a spouse, a child—” Did he imagine that her expression tightened slightly on that word? “—a friend, even a parent—both wings and roots. The roots for security and the wings for freedom.

  “I like that, but I like even better what my mama used to tell me, about a good marriage being like a trapeze act. Sometimes one partner is the catcher and the other’s the leaper, then sometimes roles swap. For it to work, each partner has to be willing at times to let go of the bar and take that leap of faith toward the other. And at all times both have to realize that it takes both of them working together—neither can leap the abyss alone.”

  He didn’t need it spelled out that she meant Cambria and him—especially her wariness about trusting and his stubbornness in trying to take charge.

  “I don’t know if—”

  “I know.” Irene patted his knee again. “The first step is to come back. Come back, Boone.”

  “Cambria won’t be happy if I go back.”

  “She’s not happy now. I’ve never seen her less happy. Come back, Boone. This isn’t the way to solve things. There’s only so long a soul can pretend a situation doesn’t exist.”

  “But—”

  “Come back, Boone. Nothing’s ever solved by hiding from the truth.”

  He studied her—the kind, soft eyes, the fading ginger hair, the arms made to deliver solid hugs. He couldn’t have said what made him so sure, but he was. Irene Weston knew why Cambria had told him to leave. She knew who he was.

  “Are you sure, Irene?”

  She looked a little pale, but she answered without hesitation. “I’m sure. We both are, Ted and I.”

  * * * *

  “Before the first guests come tomorrow, Irene, we’ll need to—”

  With a hand pressing at the small of her aching back, Cambria stopped—talking, breathing, moving, even thinking—as if a master control had been switched off. And the one pressing the button was Boone Dorsey Smith, who sat at the kitchen table with Ted and Irene, where she’d never expected to see him again.

  She’d survived the past day by refusing to think or feel. All yesterday afternoon she’d smoothed gravel in the drive, working at a pace that left her drained and sore. It hadn’t been enough to make her sleep. After curtly telling her family that Boone had been recalled to North Carolina on business and letting them infer that things had gone wrong between the two of them, she’d skipped dinner and sat on the bench behind her cabin most of the night, staring at the darkness, seeing nothing ahead of her.

  This morning she’d eaten like an automaton, refusing to meet Irene’s worried looks. When Ted had asked if she’d help him seed a barley field, she’d turned him down flat; it was an excuse to get her aside to talk to her, and she couldn’t take that right now. Pete had revived enough from his funk at Boone’s departure to laugh a little and say it was a good thing, since Cambria didn’t look in any shape to operate heavy machinery.

  Instead she’d launched a back-straining marathon of bed-making. She’d made every bed in the bunkhouse and in every cabin. Including the one in the westernmost cabin, where the sheets still carried the faint scent of the man she’d been falling in love with.

  That man now sat before her. Why couldn’t he be back in North Carolina, with a thousand miles between them, instead of sitting here, looking her full in the face? He’d had his chance. The damned idiot had walked back in front of the firing squad and wouldn’t even use a blindfold.

  “What are you doing here? I told you—”

  “I asked him to come back, Cambria,” announced Irene.

  “Mama, don’t interfere in this. He has to leave. Right away.”

  “Now, Cambria—”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know you do, dear. But I think you’re wrong.”

  “And I agree with her.” Without any other motion, Cambria slowly turned her head toward Ted as he spoke. “He’s our guest. No matter what problems there are between the two of you, he’s our guest—Irene’s and mine.”

  “There are reasons. Other reasons.”

  “We know.”

  She shook her head at Irene’s calm certainty. “It’s not just between him and me. It’s...it�
�s other things.”

  “It’s that he’s Pete’s birth father.”

  In that first instant Cambria was too stunned to do anything more than meet Boone’s eyes. He was as puzzled as she was.

  Cambria swung around to Ted. He looked no more surprised than Irene had sounded.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Irene reached for Cambria’s hand, hanging limply by her side. She gave it a squeeze, then tugged slightly, nodding for Cambria to sit in the empty chair beside her.

  “We know, dear. We were just going to have a little talk with Boone here. I think you should join us.”

  Cambria sat. Because Irene wanted that or because her legs didn’t seem terribly reliable at the moment, she didn’t bother to sort out.

  “We wondered those first couple days after Boone arrived, but it didn’t take too long before we were certain,” Ted said with the same intonation he used to talk about the weather. Not uninterested—no rancher or farmer could ever be uninterested in the weather—but with an acceptance that he couldn’t change it. He could only prepare for it, enjoy its best and stand up to its worst.

  “How?”

  “Irene mentioned it first.” Ted nodded to his wife for her to explain.

  “I saw a resemblance. When I went back through old pictures of Pete and looked for it, I could see a...a look about the two of them. Plus, I knew Pete’s biological mother came from North Carolina. They told us that, and that she and the father were both eighteen and in good health. That’s all we knew.”

  “But after Boone came, we did some research on him,” Ted continued. “And that pretty much confirmed it in our minds.”

  “But you never said anything.”

  “You mean to you, Cambria?” Ted shook his head. “No. It seemed like the two of you should work out what you wanted to be telling each other, and what secrets you weren’t telling each other.”

  Boone’s eyes flicked to her, and she knew he’d recognized that her father’s words pertained to her as well as him.

  “Pete?”

  Ted shook his head. “No, we didn’t say anything to him. If Boone didn’t want to tell him, there was no point. And if he did...well, that would wait until we got to that bridge.”

  “How could you take him in and treat him like part of our family when you knew who he was and what he wanted?”

  Irene smiled a little. “How could we not be nice to him when we knew that he’d helped give life to part of our family? As to knowing what he wants—” She looked at Boone, sitting across the table from her. “I don’t believe that even he knows what he wants.”

  Boone had sat motionless while they’d talked about him as if he weren’t there, but now he roused himself and looked from Irene to Ted, then back to Irene, sparing only a glance at Cambria.

  “I don’t want to take him away from you. I swear that. Maybe before I came here I thought...But not once I saw him. I wouldn’t take him away from you, not any of you.”

  “You couldn’t.” Under Irene’s certainty, Cambria thought she deciphered a note of sympathy for Boone.

  Cambria shook her head—none of that misguided sympathy Irene sprinkled around like fairy dust would stick to her. She would keep clear sight of what was going on here. “This is insane. He has no claim on Pete. Donating a few sperm isn’t what makes a father.” She rounded on Ted. “You tell them. You’re the one who knows about really being a father.”

  “And you’re the one who taught me.” He put a weathered, gnarled hand atop hers, calming, slowing her as he had for as long as she could remember. “The day I married Angie Lee, you marched up to me and you looked me right in the eyes and said, ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘I’m your daddy.’ ” Cambria’s eyes filled so quickly she couldn’t stop one tear from spilling down. “It wasn’t blood or birth that made that so. What made it so was you and me, in our hearts.”

  “Then tell them, tell him—”

  “It’s not you and me this time, Cammy. It’s them. Pete and Boone. They’re the only ones who can decide who Boone’ll be in Pete’s life.”

  She was shaking her head before Ted finished. “No. No. He has to leave, Dad. He can’t just show up here sixteen years later and start making demands.”

  “I’m not making demands.”

  Cambria swung on him. “You want Pete!”

  “I’m his father. I want to help him. I can help him. I can’t change not being around the first sixteen years, but I can offer Pete things—money for college for one.”

  Cambria knew Irene and Ted exchanged a look, but she couldn’t interpret it. It might have been that it was coded in the closed communication of long-married couples, or it might have been that she was too strongly focused on Boone.

  “Isn’t that just like you, Boone Dorsey Smith.” From her first word his eyes narrowed and darkened, sensing the coming attack. But she didn’t relent. “You walk in here and start trying to take charge, to order everyone’s life around. As usual. You’re going to move right in and do the things for your son that you think need to be done. You’ve decided he should go to college, so that’s it. Off he goes. On your schedule, of course. Is that the way you treated our sister, too? No wonder she doesn’t want to see you anymore.”

  Boone flinched, but before anyone else could react, the screen door flew open and Pete came barreling in.

  “What’s—Hey, Boone, you’re back! That’s great! That’s...” Pete’s headlong pace slowed, then stopped several feet short of Boone. His outstretched hand dropped to his side. “What’s going on?”

  At first the only answer was silence that must have shouted at him that the discussion had involved him. Then, as always, Irene stepped in. “Boone would like to talk to you, Pete. Maybe the two of you can go for a walk, down by the creek.”

  The boy gripped the back of the empty chair in front of him, his knuckles straining white. His face matched their paleness except for a streak of dark color on each cheek. It made his eyebrows stand out, emphasizing his resemblance to Boone. “No.”

  “Pete,” said Ted quietly. “There are some things the man needs to say to you.”

  “Okay, he can say them. But say them here, in front of everybody. There’s nothing I want to hear that you all can’t hear.” He looked around a little desperately. “You’re my family.”

  Cambria reached out to clasp Pete’s hand, even as Ted nodded reassurance and Irene said, “Of course we’re your family,” the same way she would have said the sun would rise.

  With that backing, Pete faced Boone, chin raised, and demanded, “So say what you’ve got to say.”

  Even feeling the fine tremor of Pete’s hand under hers, Cambria felt her heart constrict at the strain in Boone’s face, and the pain and fear she caught flickering in the gray depths of his eyes, so similar to the ones that challenged him now.

  The voice that had made her laugh, that had persuaded her to trust, that had whispered passion to her, that had gasped her name and that had spoken of loving her, cracked slightly, but got the words out.

  “I’m your father, Pete.’’

  Chapter Eleven

  “You’re not my father. I have a father. He’s the only father I’ll ever want.”

  Feelings rushed over Cambria like a dam-break flood. Colliding, fighting each other, sinking and rising. Relief. That Irene was right; Boone couldn’t take Pete from them. Pleasure. That Ted had those fiercely honest words to remember if he ever wondered what he meant to his son. Pride. That a young brother, who could so easily have been swayed by the romantic vision of a long-lost father, instead valued steady, calm love so wisely. Pain. That Boone’s sure hope had been rejected. Regret. That Boone could not have been simply a guest she’d fallen in love with.

  “I know you have a father, Pete.” Boone tried to make eye contact; Pete focused somewhere over his left shoulder. “I know you love him very much, the same way you love all your family. I guess I should have said I’m your biological father. I just—”

  “
So you’ve been lying to us all this time. Pretending you wanted to be my friend. Liking baseball and all that. That was all lying.” Pete’s mouth twisted as if with a bitter taste.

  “No. When I came here I wasn’t sure how to go about all this. I’d just found out.” He took a quick, heavy breath. “Let me tell you from the start, Pete. There was a girl I dated in high school, right before I left for the army. I didn’t know she was pregnant when I left, and I never knew she’d had a baby—our baby. You. I didn’t know until a few months ago, when an old friend let something slip about his cousin—my high school girlfriend. When I went to talk to Marl—”

  “Don’t tell me!” Pete backed away. Cambria held her breath, afraid he might bolt. “I don’t want to know her name. Don’t tell me her name. Don’t tell me any more.” He looked from Irene to Ted. “You said it was up to me if I wanted to go looking for my birth parents, right? All along you’ve said that. So it should be up to me if I don’t want to know, either, shouldn’t it? Shouldn’t that be my choice? Well, I don’t want to know. I don’t want any parents other than the ones I’ve got. I don’t want any other family.”

  Boone leaned forward. “Pete, I know I couldn’t take Ted’s place in your life. I don’t want to. I swear that. But part of me helped make you, and there are things I can do for you—”

  “Leave me alone. You can do that for me.”

  Boone winced, but he didn’t look away. “There are ways I can help you. I owe you that. Doors I can open. I can help you pay for college, or—”

  “No!” Pete’s face went red and mottled under his tan. Even clenched into fists, his hands betrayed a tremor. “No, you can’t. We don’t want your charity.”

  “You’re my son. It’s not—”

  “That’s for families to do. I’m Peter Andrew Weston— that’s who I am. I have a family and you’re not part of it. You came in here and pretended to be our friend, pretended to like us just for us, but you were lying. A fake and a liar—that’s all you are. We’re a family—a family—and we don’t need anybody like you around. Go away and leave us alone. Just leave us the hell alone.”