TAKE A CHANCE (Chance Colorado Series)

by Mayhue, Melissa

  But it wasn’t too late—please, God, don’t let it be too late!—He wasn’t giving up. He was in love with her. He knew that now. He loved her and he would fight for her. He would fight for them. He would do whatever it took, for as long as it took, to get her back.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  “Up and at ’em, sweetie. You can’t hide under the covers for the rest of your life. Believe me, it won’t help.” Susie lifted the blankets in a large, sweeping move, exposing Allie to the bright light streaming in her windows. “I speak from experience, you know.”

  “Ugh,” Allie responded, rolling to her stomach to bury her face in her pillow.

  Staying in bed might not make things any better, but it kept her from having to deal with any of it, and that alone was worth retreating from the world.

  “Logan called again yesterday. He wants to talk to you.”

  “No!” She opened one eye to glare in her mother’s direction. “Absolutely, positively no way I’m having anything to do with him. Not now, not ever.”

  Her mother’s skeptical look expressed what she didn’t need to say in words. Allie knew it would be impossible to avoid Logan forever in a town the size of Chance. But she intended to give it her best shot, and hiding in her room, under her covers, was one heck of a good start.

  “Your call, I suppose,” her mother conceded. “But I would ask you to get up and get dressed. I need you to help me with something I can’t do myself.”

  Allie sighed and rolled to her back before pushing up to sit. Her mother so rarely asked her to do anything, she could hardly refuse now. Wallowing in her own private misery would just have to wait for a little while.

  “What can I do for you, Mom?”

  “I’ve decided to rent out the apartment over the old garage, so it has to be emptied out.”

  That explained why her mom needed help. The old garage had been Allie’s dad’s space, housing his office in what was originally built to be an apartment. Susie hadn’t set foot in the place since before her husband’s death.

  “What brought this on?”

  “A desire to pay bills, mostly,” Susie said with a sheepish smile. “I ran into Brent Corey yesterday when I went to the post office and we got to talking. He’s just sold the old Cheevers building and the woman who bought it is going to need a place to live until they can get some renovations done. I offered up the garage. But before she can move in—”

  “We need to move all that old crap out,” Allie finished for her.

  “Exactly. I have a stack of boxes I’ll take out there for you while you’re getting dressed, and then I’m going over to Mama Odie’s to pick up some more. I left a sandwich on the counter for you.”

  “Thanks, Mom. You want me to pack it all up?” Heaven only knew how much stuff her father had stored in there.

  Her mom shrugged, her expression veiled as she headed for the door. “Keep whatever you want, or anything you think Matt might want, and toss the rest. I don’t want any of it.”

  And yet her mom told her not to hide under the covers. Allie shook her head and climbed into the shower.

  “Maybe that’s how she knows it doesn’t work,” Allie mused before sticking her head under the hot water.

  After two days of hiding out in her room feeling sorry for herself, the shower felt heavenly. Her heart might be broken, but that didn’t mean life wouldn’t go on.

  She grabbed the sandwich on her way out the back door, stopping to admire what a beautiful, warm day she had to attack this task, though it must have been cool earlier this morning because the smell of wood smoke wisped in the air if she breathed deeply. Another month or two and they’d all be firing up their woodstoves.

  She headed out across the field toward the old building halfway between their house and her grandparents’ home, the two-story garage apartment. When she’d been little, she’d often imagined that one day, after her dad had retired and didn’t need an office anymore, she would move into this apartment and fill the walls with shelves of her beloved books.

  Of course, she’d also imagined that soon after that she’d marry Logan and live happily ever after.

  Life hadn’t worked out at all like she’d imagined.

  “But I do still have my books,” she said, grunting as she put her shoulder against one of the big doors to push it open.

  Dust lifted on the air currents, sparkling like little jewels floating thorough the air as the tiny bits drifted through a sunbeam. A short coughing fit later, Allie amended that mental picture to tiny, fuzzy floating jewels.

  Along with the stack of collapsed boxes, her mom had left a pair of plastic gloves, a box of trash bags, and a set of keys.

  “Good call, Mom,” she said, slipping on the gloves.

  Considering how long the rooms had remained untouched, there was no telling what kind of creepy-crawlies she’d bump into. That thought gave her pause, but not for long. If she didn’t clean it out, they’d have to hire someone to do it and there was no money to hire anyone to do anything. It was her or nothing.

  With the boxes tucked under one arm and the trash bags under the other, she climbed the stairs and fit the big antique key into the lock. When she walked inside, she felt as if a memory capsule had been unlocked, and for just a moment, she wished more than anything that Matt were here with her to keep her from facing this on her own.

  Not that she’d spent much time up here. This had always been Dad’s special place, and no one was allowed inside except when he invited them in, which wasn’t often.

  Maybe that was why it felt so strange to be in here now, as if she were creeping around like a trespasser.

  She dropped the boxes in the center of the room beside his old desk and steeled herself to peek into each of the adjoining rooms. Surprisingly, this job might not take nearly as much effort as she’d imagined. The bedroom was completely empty, if you ignored the huge spider web in the corner, which was exactly what she was going to do until she could drag a vacuum cleaner up here to deal with any eight-legged beasties.

  A quick scan of the bathroom revealed only a few personal items in the drawers and medicine chest, so she tossed a trash bag in there to fill later. The kitchen was equally sparse—a coffeepot, one cup and a couple of hand towels.

  That left the one bookshelf and her father’s desk.

  The books were a no-brainer. She boxed them to take to the Hand. They could all go into the used-book sales area.

  Her father’s desk was another matter. It felt almost like an invasion of his privacy to sit in his chair, preparing to go through his things, but this had to be done. It would be easier if she kept it impersonal. This needed to be a ruthless cleaning, as if it belonged to someone she’d never met. If it didn’t have some obvious sentimental value, it went straight in the trash.

  The top drawer was filled with pens and notepads and plastic letter openers, all bearing the logos of various companies, no doubt advertising giveaways her dad had picked up at the sales conferences he’d so frequently traveled to attend. As a business supply store junkie, these were the sorts of things she could dither over all day if she allowed herself the luxury. Keep, don’t keep?

  “Ruthless,” she reminded herself, and dumped the entire contents of the drawer into a large black trash bag.

  There. She’d set the tone. It should be easier now.

  The first big filing drawer was stuffed full. File after file that looked like they were filled with copies of orders and correspondence from her father’s years as a salesman. If no one had needed this stuff up to now, they’d likely never need it. She dumped all the files into a second bag, intending to shred or burn these papers since they might contain personal information about his customers.

  It was apparent to her by now that her father hadn’t been the type to keep photos or knickknacks in his desk or on his bookshelf, so this whole task was going much more quickly and painlessly than she’d imagined it might. One more drawer full of business files to toss and she’d be done
.

  This last drawer appeared to be stuck, so she put some muscle into it, realizing as a twinge of pain shot up her arm that it wasn’t stuck. It was locked.

  “Weird,” she muttered, reaching for the ring of keys to search for one that might fit the drawer.

  The third one she tried worked, and she pulled open the last drawer.

  Not files. Stacks of letters, bound with rubber bands, redolent with the aroma of perfume even after years locked away in the drawer. Love letters? And one bulging envelope filled with photographs.

  So her dad had been a sentimental man, after all. A man who’d loved his wife and children before he’d turned into that cheater who drove off the side of the mountain with some woman half his age sitting beside him.

  She fingered the smooth paper of the top envelope on one stack, considering whether her mom might want to keep these letters. Her father had obviously valued them, keeping them up here in a locked drawer. Maybe they would remind her mom of all those good years before her husband had gone middle-aged crazy.

  It was odd that there were so many of them. How had her mom managed to write so many in the short time they dated? She must have written to him every single day. And if not then, why would she write them later, once they were married? The only times he’d been away from home had been for a day or two at most when he’d traveled to sales conferences.

  Not that it really mattered. The letters were private moments that belonged to her mother.

  She skipped over the stacks to reach for the brown envelope filled with photos. Carefully, to avoid bending them, she dumped the contents on the desk in front of her, her heart pounding. That her father had kept photos of his family close at hand tugged at her heart, and she prepared herself for an emotional moment or two when she flipped over the photos to leaf through all his old family memories.

  Her first emotions were anything but the pleasant ones she’d expected.

  These weren’t family photos. They weren’t even photos of anyone Allie recognized. All women, all in various states of undress.

  Allie quickly slapped the envelope down on top of the photographs, feeling as if she’d walked into a room she shouldn’t have.

  A glance to the stacks of letters left her with an uneasy feeling of dread, and she reached for the first one, setting it on the desk in front of her.

  Not her mother’s handwriting. Addressed to her father at a post office box in Denver. She reached for another stack and found they were the same. All addressed to her father at the Denver address, all with different handwriting, none of them her mother’s.

  Thank goodness she hadn’t taken these down to her mother!

  How her dad had managed to meet so many women in the last year or so of his life was beyond her, but it didn’t matter now. She’d burn all of these so her mother wouldn’t have her husband’s final infidelity rubbed in her face again.

  Allie picked up a third stack and the aged rubber band snapped, scattering envelopes into the drawer and on the floor. She shoved back the chair and got down on her knees to pick them up, noticing as she did some of the dates on the letters.

  This one was postmarked the same year she was born.

  How was that even possible?

  A closer look at the stacks showed dates that ranged over a thirty-year period. Here was one dated the same year her parents had married. And one from the year before that!

  “What the hell was he doing?”

  “I forgot about those.”

  Allie dropped the letters as if they burned her fingers, looking up to see her mother standing in the doorway, her face pinched in sorrow.

  “I came as soon as I remembered. I thought maybe I could get here before you found them.”

  “You knew about these?” Allie asked, unable to believe her mother understood the depth of what her husband had done. “All of them?”

  “All of them,” Susie confirmed. “Some men are addicted to alcohol or drugs. Your father suffered from a different kind of addiction.”

  “I don’t understand,” Allie said. “You seemed like you were devastated by the circumstances of his death. By his being found with that woman in his car.”

  “I was devastated. Jimmy broke our agreement. I was to turn a blind eye and he was never to humiliate me by carrying on his little indiscretions anywhere near home.”

  Susie approached the desk and lifted one corner of the envelope covering the photographs, as if to confirm what she already knew she’d find. With an expression of disgust, she scooped up a handful and shoved them into the black trash bag sitting on the floor.

  “Why did you put up with it for all those years?”

  Susie continued to stuff handfuls of letters and photographs into the trash, pausing for only a moment to fix her daughter with a stare. “What would you have had me do? Leave him? By the time I learned about Jimmy’s little problem, I had no family to go back to. I’d used what little money my parents had left me in my first year of college, where I met your dad. Mama Odie and Papa Flynn treated me as if I were their own daughter. I didn’t want to lose the family I had found here. And,”—she shrugged, a sad smile curving her lips—“I was pregnant with your brother. At the time, staying here, making the best of my situation seemed to be the smartest thing for me to do.”

  Allie shook her head, wanting to reject everything her mother had told her. “When I first heard about the accident, about him going bad like that, I didn’t want to believe it. But to know it had been going on forever—”

  Susie cut her off with a snorting sound of sheer derision. “Going bad? Good grief, Allie. Are you listening to yourself? Your dad wasn’t a month-old bag of celery. He didn’t go bad. Jimmy had a dependency he couldn’t shake. He even tried seeing a therapist for a while, but, in the end, it was who he was.”

  “I always thought you guys had the perfect story. I wanted to be just like you. To find my perfect story. I thought I had,” Allie said, her last phone call to Logan playing through her head. “But I was wrong. They all go bad sooner or later, don’t they?”

  Susie came around the desk, dropped to her knees beside Allie and cupped her hands on her daughter’s cheeks. “Is that why you’re refusing to speak to Logan? Because you think he’s gone bad? Baby, men don’t go bad. They either are or they aren’t. Logan isn’t anything like your dad.”

  Her mom pulled her close, stroking her hair like she had when Allie had been a little girl and had come home crying over one hurt or another. In spite of her best efforts, tears prickled in Allie’s eyes, threatening to fall in the face of her mother’s kindness.

  “A long time ago, Allie, you told me that you had to leave Chance because Logan was the love of your life and you couldn’t stand being here and not having him. Do you still feel that way? Do you still love him?”

  Fighting back the tears, Allie nodded. “More than anything. But when I called him, Shayla answered his phone. He was with her.”

  Again. Like history repeating itself, she had lost him to Shayla once more.

  “Then don’t cut your nose off to spite your face.” Susie pulled away from her, reaching out to tuck a strand of her daughter’s hair back behind her ear. “You’re so much stronger than I ever was, Allie. You’re a fighter. If you love Logan, don’t let your wounded pride keep you from going after what you really want. Talk to him. See if there isn’t a way to work things out. Don’t flounder around trying to recreate someone else’s perfect story. Take a chance and create your own. I’ve seen the way he looks at you, baby. I don’t think you’ll have to fight too hard.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “I do,” her mother assured her. “You’ve never been afraid to work hard for what you wanted. It would be pretty sad to see you start being afraid now.”

  Her mother was right. She was rolling over like some pathetic quitter. She was dealing with Logan in exactly the same way she’d dealt with Drake. Only Logan wasn’t Drake. Logan was the man she wanted for the lead in her perfect st
ory.

  “Thanks, Mom,” she said, kissing her mother’s forehead before standing and walking to the door. “Will you be okay finishing this off by yourself?”

  “Go!” her mom answered, flapping her arms in a shooing motion.

  Not that Allie needed any more urging. Talking to her mother had opened her eyes. If Shayla Jenkins-Gold thought she was just going to waltz in and steal Logan out from under Allie’s nose, she had another think coming. That wasn’t happening. Not without a damn good fight, anyway.

  Allie loved Logan. She always had. And right now, she was going down to the fire station to tell him that. She was going to do her best to convince him that he loved her, too.

  Ten minutes later, she turned into the parking area at the fire station and hopped from the old pickup she’d borrowed from her grandmother. Though Logan’s pickup was parked outside, she knew the minute she opened the door to the darkened station that she wouldn’t find him here.

  The big red fire truck was gone.

  Back outside, she stood by her car, trying to decide what to do next. If she knew where he’d been called to, she’d have a better idea of how long he might be gone. She could call him, but private calls had no place in a firefighting scenario. She’d never risk distracting him when he might need to have his full attention on his work.

  Besides, what she needed to say needed to be said in person.

  As she buckled her seat belt, she noticed a haze on her windshield and flipped on the wipers. With their first swipe, a fine gray powder floated into the air and quickly settled back on the glass.

  Though it had been years, she’d seen this stuff before. Ash.

  “Oh, Lord,” she muttered, rolling down her window to stick her head outside.

  Wood smoke. What a fool she’d been to even consider that someone might be using their fireplace on a day like this. From the strong scent, she’d bet everything she had on a forest fire. A quick scan of the sky and she spotted what she’d totally ignored earlier. A huge white cloud billowed on the western horizon, unmistakable proof that she would have won her bet.