This was the third time in a year he’d had the misfortune to require treatment at this blasted place. Every visit left him more determined than ever not to return unless it was to the basement morgue.
Most people in town considered him a bastard who plowed his way through life, taking what he wanted without fear or second doubts. That wasn’t precisely true. If he dared, he would grab these IVs and yank them out of his arm, unpeel the cardiac leads and head for the door.
He might be strong-minded but he wasn’t stupid. He had a bad heart. That was the cold, stark truth. Oh, the doctors gave it all kinds of five-dollar words, but it boiled down to a bum ticker, so he was forced to lie here helpless and let the idiots fuss over him while his son was here in Hope’s Crossing for the first time in twenty years.
Jackson.
That moment when he had walked into the bookstore, turned his head and seen his son standing there, strong and handsome and hearty, was one he would remember for a long time. Oh, Harry had seen Jack over the years—not that his son had any idea of those surreptitious trips, which Harry had made in disguise when his sources let him know of some building dedication or architectural award.
Jack never would have seen him at any of those places. Harry had made sure of that. Those few glimpses of his son had been both incredibly rewarding and bitterly painful, and had left him aching for more.
He reached for the water bottle beside his bed, cursing the stupid lines tethering him to the equipment. Wouldn’t you know? The simpleton nurse had left it just out of his reach. He was straining with one arm to reach it without falling out of the bed, when he heard the door open.
“Help me here, will you, you idiot?” he barked, without taking his gaze off the unattainable water bottle.
A long silence greeted him, and finally a voice answered, “Still as charming as ever, I see.”
Off balance and extending his arm beyond a safe reach, Harry would have fallen sideways out of bed if he hadn’t caught himself at the last minute.
His heart fluttered, and he thought with horror that maybe he was having another attack of angina from the damned atrial fibrillation he’d been dealing with for a year, but then he realized it was just completely understandable shock at the sight of his son in the doorway.
“Son.”
Jack’s mouth tightened at the word, but he moved closer to the bed and picked up the water bottle Harry had been scrambling after like a pig snuffling for apples.
“This what you were trying for?” Jack asked.
He grabbed at it, feeling ridiculous. “Yeah. Stupid nurses always leave it just out of reach. What’s the point of making sure my water bottle is full when I can’t grab it?”
Jack didn’t make a comment, only raised an eyebrow. Harry had wondered himself if the nurses didn’t do it out of some kind of passive-aggressive spite. He sipped at his water, wishing they could be meeting under different circumstances, not when he was lying here in a damned hospital gown.
“I didn’t expect you to show up.”
Jack shrugged. “Call it a crazy impulse. Maybe I just wanted to see how close you were to kicking the bucket.”
He refused to show any reaction to that. He had reaped what he’d sown with his son, hadn’t he? “I’ve still got a few miles left in me. The idiot doctors say I’ve got atrial fibrillation. A-fib. I’ve been on medicine for it, but I guess it’s not working as well as we thought.”
Jack seemed to digest that information. “Are they keeping you long?”
“Just overnight while they run some more tests.” If they couldn’t figure out the right medication, he was going to have to go to Denver for a procedure to reshock his heart, but he decided not to tell Jack that. He quickly changed the subject.
“What’s this about you having a daughter? You were a smart kid. Didn’t you have the brains to use protection?”
Jack sighed. “It was a shock to me too. I haven’t spoken with Maura in twenty years now. She never said a word to me about a pregnancy. I’d like to think I would have taken responsibility if I had known. Every child deserves a father willing to stand up and be a man and take part in raising him.”
The implication being that Harry had done nothing of the sort. Which was true enough, but not the whole story, something Jack wouldn’t have been able to see twenty years ago.
“She’s a smart girl, that one. I understand she was valedictorian and earned an architectural scholarship at UC–Boulder. I guess she’s a chip off the old block, right?”
Jack frowned. “How do you know anything about Sage? A few hours ago, you had no idea who she even was.”
Harry had his sources, who had been busy all afternoon and evening finding out everything they could about this new relation of his. Right now, he figured he probably knew more about Sage McKnight than her own mother, and he was pleased beyond measure that his granddaughter showed such promise, despite her upbringing with that flighty woman.
“The mother, Maura. She’s a piece of work. Hooked up with a musician a few years after you left. From what I hear, their marriage only lasted about five years—long enough to make another kid. The girl who died.”
Annoyance tightened his son’s mouth, so much like his mother’s. The girl shared the same mouth. Harry had ordered his people to send any pictures they could find of her, and he was amazed now that he’d never picked up on the resemblance when he had seen her around town over the years. Amazing what a person could miss when he wasn’t expecting to see it.
“A real tragedy, that accident,” he went on. “All of Hope’s Crossing has been in a tizzy since April, pointing fingers, trying to figure out what went wrong. I’ll tell you what went wrong. Nothing new here. A bunch of headstrong kids take a couple of drinks, smoke some weed, and think it all gives them immortality and nothing can touch them.”
This wasn’t what he wanted to talk about with Jack. Harry had waited twenty years for his son to return, and this wasn’t at all the way he’d pictured their reunion.
He fidgeted and smoothed the blankets. “You didn’t come here to talk about something that happened eight months ago to strangers in a town you hate.”
Jack met his gaze head-on. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure why I came here. It was a mistake. I should go. Sorry to have bothered you.”
No. Not yet!
Jackson turned as if to go, and Harry racked his brain for some way to keep him here. He finally blurted out the first thing that came to his mind.
“I thought maybe you were angling to be hired to design the town’s new recreation center.”
His son gave a short laugh that didn’t sound amused in the slightest. “Despite what you may think, I don’t need to come to Hope’s Crossing trolling for business. My firm does fine.”
Better than fine, Harry thought with pride. They were one of the most respected design companies on the West Coast, and his son had built the whole thing out of nothing. Of course, he couldn’t mention he knew that very well, that he had followed his son’s career intensely from the moment he’d finished his graduate work at UC–Berkeley.
“Given your connection to me, I figured you might think you have some kind of in. Well, you don’t.”
Jack looked if he didn’t know whether to be amused or offended. “I would never assume such a thing, even if I knew what the hell you were talking about.”
“It’s still in the initial planning stages, but I can tell you it’s going to be a huge project and one of the most innovative facilities in the nation, with indoor and outdoor recreation opportunities. You can get a project prospectus like everybody else, s
o don’t think you can worm the information out of me when I’m on my deathbed.”
“Now you’re on your deathbed.”
Harry shrugged. With his heart problems of the past year, he felt closer than he ever had in his life. Regret was a miserable companion to a man in the twilight of his life, especially since he had always considered himself invincible.
And the man standing reluctantly by his bedside was his biggest regret. The Grand Poobah of his failures.
“You can call my assistant if you want more information about the recreation center. I’m sure it’s a project of larger magnitude than you’re used to. Probably out of your league.”
“No doubt,” Jack murmured.
Before Harry could come up with something else to say, the door opened without warning and his nurse backed in carrying a dinner tray.
“Time for your dinner and evening meds.” She turned around and blinked a little when she saw Jack. “Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had company.”
She gave his son a quick look and then a longer, more assessing one. Yeah, Jack had always been a good-looking cuss. Much like Harry when he’d been younger.
“This is my son, come to visit me on my deathbed,” Harry said.
“Your…son? Oh.”
The nurse looked as surprised as she would if Harry had just introduced him as his pet monkey. She was so young she probably didn’t even know he had a son. She would have been just a kid when Jack left.
Harry had been alone for two decades in that big house in the canyon. Twenty years. Too damn long.
For a time, he’d thought he wanted things that way. He had been convinced Jack was a stubborn, self-righteous little prick who didn’t understand the way the world worked. Jack didn’t want him in his life, and Harry had been perfectly content to give him his way. Amazing how a little heart attack could change a man’s perspective.
“How lovely to have your family with you.” She smiled. “Sorry I’m so late with your dinner, but your food was held up in the kitchen. Better late than never, isn’t it?”
“Is it? It’s lousy either way. I still don’t understand why the fool doctors won’t let me have my chef bring me something decent.”
“We had this argument the last time you stayed with us. You know your nutritional content has to be screened carefully for sodium, potassium and magnesium. What would happen if we just let you have any old thing?”
“I might actually eat it,” Harry muttered.
“Oh, you.” She fussed around his IV tree for a moment, then started switching out bags.
“I’ll go and let you have your dinner,” Jack said.
Harry wanted to call him back, assure him he wanted him to stay, but he didn’t want to sound weak in front of either his son or the nurse.
“Call my office if you want to see the prospectus,” he said gruffly.
Jack gave him an “are you kidding” sort of look before he left.
Harry watched him go, furious with himself. What the hell was wrong with him? Twenty years of silence, and when he finally saw his son again, he could only come up with inane conversation about nothing.
Would he ever see him again? Or was this the only moment he would have to remember until he died?
He lay in the hospital bed under the watchful eye of the nurse, wishing he could rub away the sudden ache in his chest that had nothing whatsoever to do with his heart problems.
* * *
“DOES EVERYTHING look okay?”
Maura pasted on a smile for her daughter. “Relax, honey. The pork loin looks beautiful and smells even better. It will be delicious.”
“I shouldn’t be so nervous. It’s only dinner. It’s just… It’s my dad, you know?”
Yes, she did remember that little fact. Maura forced a smile. “I know. Everything will be perfect.”
Three days after Christmas, her dining room still looked festive. A garland was draped around the chandelier, and the mantelpiece of the old fireplace was covered in more garlands, gleaming ribbons and chunky candles.
The table was set with her best china, white plates with delicate blue borders. It was old and delicate, exquisite, really, a wedding present from Chris’s parents. The set had once belonged to Chris’s maternal great-grandmother, who had been one of the original silver queens in Colorado.
After the divorce, she had tried to give it back to Jennie Parker, but her ex-mother-in-law had insisted she keep it in order to hand it down someday to Layla....
Her heart gave a sharp kick at the memory, and she bit her lip, refusing to give in to the sudden burn of emotions. She knew this emptiness would never fully go away, but the past week, the pain had seemed fresh and new. Layla had loved the holidays. She was always the one who’d insisted on decorating the tree the day after Thanksgiving, who would drag them out to go caroling with the church choir through the neighborhood, who would wake up before the sunrise on Christmas morning so she could rush in to see the pile of presents.
Without her, the season seemed not a time of hope and renewal but of bitter loss.
Christmas morning, three days earlier, had been particularly poignant. She and Sage had both put on cheerful faces as they’d opened their gifts to each other, but she could tell her daughter was feeling the same ache.
Christmas night they had gone to the noisy, crowded McKnight party at Mary Ella’s, where all her siblings gathered with their families. Claire and Riley had been there with Owen and Macy, Angie and Jim, of course, with their children, and Alex. Even her sister Rose had driven out with her family from Utah in the middle of a snowstorm in order to make it back to Hope’s Crossing to spend Christmas in Mary Ella’s small house.
She suspected Rose and Michael had come for her sake, to lend emotional support on her first Christmas without Layla. While she had been touched at the gesture and happy to see her just-older sister, she had thought a few times that the avalanche of concern just kept piling on.
She touched the edge of a place setting and straightened the silverware a little, remembering how when she and Sage had returned home from the noise and craziness of the family gathering, they had sat here in the living room by the fire, watching the lights twinkle on the tree, snowflakes gently falling and the little shih tzu puppy wrestling with a leftover ribbon. She had been able to hold it together, until she’d looked over and seen tears trickling down Sage’s cheeks.
“I miss her,” Sage had said softly. “Sometimes I miss her so much I don’t think I can bear it.”
“Oh, honey. I know,” she had said. What else could she say? She knew from experience no words were adequate to soothe this pain, so she had held Sage and the two of them had cried that they would share no more Christmases with Layla.
Today Sage hadn’t had time to grieve for her sister, too busy shopping and cleaning and cooking. Maura was glad for that, even if Sage was doing all this work for her father. Jack was due to arrive in half an hour for one last evening with his daughter before he left in the morning to return to the coast.
One more day and he would be gone. She had hardly seen him since that first morning after he’d arrived in town, just brief moments when he’d picked up or dropped off Sage on their way to some outing. This would be the longest time she had spent in his company since their ill-fated breakfast at the Center of Hope Café.
If she had her choice, she would have tried to get out of this dinner and let Sage have a quiet evening with her father. What could she do, though? Sage had asked her to stay, and she couldn’t find a decent excuse to refuse.
Maybe after he left, she would be able to breathe aga
in.
She looked around the beautifully presented dining table again, but couldn’t see anything out of place.
“So put me to work. What can I help you do?” she asked.
Sage shook her head. “Nothing! Absolutely nothing. You’ve been working at the store all day. Jack won’t be here for forty-five minutes. You can go take a nap or read a book or play with Puck—whatever you want, as long as it’s something relaxing, not working here in the kitchen with me. This is my gift to the both of you. My parents.”
Okay, she probably shouldn’t feel so squeamish about being lumped into that category with him. It was the truth, after all, but considering herself a co-parent with Jack still felt so strange after all these years on her own.
“Are you sure? I don’t mind helping.”
“Positive. Everything’s under control. Why don’t you go take a soak in the hot tub?” Sage suggested.
The idea had instant appeal. The hot tub on the edge of her patio overlooking Woodrose Mountain was her one indulgence, especially on winter nights with the snow falling gently on her face. “I wouldn’t feel right leaving you in here to do all the work.”
“Mom, go!” Sage ordered. “I’m serious. You’ll only be in the way. I’ve got this.”
She wanted to argue but saw the futility of it. A soak actually would be perfect and might soothe her psyche a bit, give her a little inner peace to handle the ordeal of the next few hours.
“Okay. I won’t be long.”
“Take your time,” Sage said.
Maura finally surrendered and hurried into her bedroom to change into her swimming suit, and grab a towel and the book she was currently reading for the January book club meeting.
She hadn’t shoveled the path to the hot tub since the last storm, and the two inches of new snow froze her toes in her flip-flops. But she danced quickly through it and worked the lid off, then slid into the always-hot water with a sigh of pure bliss.
RaeAnne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry SummerWoodrose MountainSweet Laurel Falls Page 65