“That was his wife, stupid.” Justin threw his clean boot at Frankie, his jaw clenching in dark fury. “What’s the matter with you? She was probably sixty years old.”
“Swell. Thanks for ruinin’ my dreams.” Frankie tossed the boot back a little harder than necessary. “Told ya they all start to look good after too long out in the sticks.”
“You’re just nuts. All of you. Forget it, okay?” Justin sighed and massaged the bridge of his nose, wishing he could think of something—anything—else to talk about.
Frankie huddled next to Ernie at the window, smugly fixing his tie. “Fact is, I told Bruno you went to school with one of the dames who’s here visiting and wanted to catch up on all the old biz.” He winked. “You’re from Kentucky, too, ain’t ya, Fairbanks? ’Cause that’s what I told ’em. They’re comin’ over to see ya right after formation.”
“Who’s from Kentucky? One of the girls?” Justin’s fingers froze on his bootlaces.
Ernie and a scattered crowd gathered around the doorway while Frankie calmly straightened his tie—leaving them all in agonizing suspense.
Justin pushed his way through and grabbed Frankie by the collar. “I’m through with Kentucky, and I don’t wanna see anybody from back there. Got it?”
“Don’t worry. She wouldn’t like you anyway, with your scar face and big ol’ nose.” Frankie grinned, too intoxicated by the power of superior knowledge to be intimidated. He shook Justin’s hand away and brushed off his shirt, flicking bits of lint in Justin’s direction.
Frankie leaned his elbow lazily against the doorjamb. Tie thrown back rakishly. “One of them gals is from Kentucky. Some small town out in the country I’ve never heard of. Sounds kinda like you, don’t it?” He winked. “Have fun catchin’ up.”
Justin pushed his way through the door and stormed off, not caring where he went. Except that it was far from Bruno Hodges’s barracks—and from anyone who called Kentucky home.
Especially somebody from the country who might have heard of the accident. After all, word travels fast in small towns. He grimly ran a finger over the scar on his chin, knowing that once you’re branded, it’s for life. No matter where you go or what you try to do differently.
A scar on society that never quite heals.
Until now he’d managed to hide away in silence, giving his address only to Margaret with her word that she wouldn’t tell a soul. And Margaret was a good woman. She’d given up schooling for Beanie; she wouldn’t lie. Justin would stake his life on her integrity—the integrity that should have gone to Pop and himself but didn’t.
Afternoon sunlight pooled on the sparkling aspen leaves, shivering like Septembergold gems over slender white trunks. Slipping down over the lupine-studded fields and turning the grass to copper fire, stretching Justin’s shadow a dusky blue.
In the distance loomed the jagged range of the Rocky Mountains—thick and defiant, reaching sharp, snowcapped peaks into the sky like pointed wolf fangs. They rippled across the horizon in glorious tints of rose and slate, the forests at their base already streaked through with yellow from early fall.
Those mountains had anchored Justin here in Wyoming, like the Bible verses he’d read by faint lantern light before bed, page after page. His heart soaking up new conviction and a new life beyond his past.
But now Justin kept going, striding faster and faster. Hands clenched into fists in his pockets. He left behind the housing barracks and mess hall and school—all long, wooden rectangles against the mountains and thick pine forest. The ubiquitous flagpole that snapped crisp stars and stripes into the cobalt Wyoming sky.
If he skipped camp now he’d get stuck on KP duty until the country ran out of potatoes. Weekend leave was allowed, although there wasn’t much to see outside Pinedale—but weekday skips were off-limits. Although Justin could list twenty guys like Ernie and Frankie who sneaked out nearly every night for booze, and the extra push-ups and hours spent peeling onions didn’t curb their desperate forays.
After all, what could the army do? This was the CCC, not the army. And as good as the president’s New Deal plans were, they didn’t cover all the loopholes.
Not long ago Justin would have been one of the ones slipping out after dark, glancing back over his shoulder as he hustled through the grass. Trading a pack of cards or a pocketknife for a bottle at some cheap bar in Pinedale.
And yet none of that sounded good anymore.
The memory of the burn did, as the bitter booze slid over his throat, and the haze and stupor of delightful forgetfulness. But the rest blurred into a discordant mess of vomit, headaches, lying, sneaking—and a life Justin wanted to flee as far from as Kentucky.
Justin lunged for the split-log fence that lined a thicket of lodgepole pines and Douglas firs and hoisted himself over the top, swinging over a leg. He dropped down on the other side into a patch of grass, nearly flattening the figure huddled on the other side of the fence.
A girl in a jacket and muted blue dress with a white collar crouched there against a scaly fir trunk in the shadows. She drew back and yelped in horror, circling her head with her arms.
Justin stumbled back with a cry of shock, sputtering a hundred apologies.
Until she turned up those piercing blue eyes—eyes that reminded Justin desperately of someone, somewhere. Someone he wanted to forget, to vanish from the farthest corners of his memory.
Lia Summers, daughter of the late Reverend Summers. From beautiful, aching Berea, Kentucky.
Chapter 3
For a second Justin felt his senses failing him—like the blank darkness that had hit him after he brawled with Pop years ago. The wooden plank he’d hurled at Justin smashing against the barn siding and catching him across the forehead.
In a single flash of blue from Lia’s eyes, Justin could see it all again: Reverend Summers’s crumpled ’29 Buick. Lia’s red face, streaked with tears and anger. Those same eyes, swollen and grief-crazed, as she tried to tear away and fight him. “I hate you!” she shouted, her tear-wet hair clinging to her cheek. Those words shuddering into his already quivering chest with powerful force. “I hate you!”
Until somebody drew her away. Patting her cheek and whispering into her ear.
The light glinted on something crushed tightly in her hand: her father’s glasses. One orb empty, the glass shattered.
Nausea heaved in Justin’s chest as he jerked away from Lia, tripping over a dead branch studded with pinecones.
The same way he used to run from Pop. Dagger-eyed, alcohol-reeking-breath, Pop with the horse’s whip and the leather razor strap. Secretly glad his defiance had caused Pop to come after him instead of Margaret or Beanie—but terrified to the point of nausea.
When Pop swore through slurred lips that he’d kill Mutt, Beanie’s gentle old hound, Justin slipped out one night and hustled her away to a good-hearted farm family in the next county—and told heartbroken Beanie he’d found her dead in her sleep.
After that Justin slept by Beanie’s bed on the floor, just in case Pop showed up with a shotgun.
The memories hit Justin so abruptly that he felt his throat close up, damming back a waterfall of memories.
It was too much, all of it—Lia and Kentucky and the past he thought he’d left behind. Choking him like Pop’s fist while he shook Justin until his teeth rattled.
Justin stumbled over a shallow dip in the grass and a downed pine limb, catching himself on his palms in a mess of prickly pinecones. When he got to his feet, he wiped lines of dark blood across his olive pants.
Blood that reminded him of Reverend Summers. Glass shattered. Slumped shoulders. Those eyes blinking and a rivulet of blood trickling down the side of the reverend’s gentle face.
Running. He was running again. Just like he’d always run from everything—from Pop, from Kentucky. From the police on that fatal day he’d plowed his father’s battered, patched-up old Model T clunker into Reverend Summers’s Buick in a drunken stupor, nearly taking out the side of Mickel’
s Grocery and old man Tither’s mule.
At stinking fourteen years old, to boot—just a few days shy of fifteen. Justin was bigger than the other boys, with a huskier build and jutting chin, and the police thought he was a college kid at first. Until they wiped the blood from his face, and why, it was that young Fairbanks boy again—drunk as a sot. It was 1937 now, and Justin was still running away.
What kind of jerk would leave Lia huddled there by herself? She was a girl, for goodness’ sake. No matter what fool reason she had for showing up in Wyoming or hiding out under a bunch of silly pines. The least he could do was see if she was all right or point out how to get back to Hodges’s bunk.
Maybe say “I’m sorry” and accept her hate.
That’s what a good man would do anyway. If Justin could ever figure out how to be one.
Justin wiped his sleeve over his eyes and let out his breath, a shaft of afternoon sunlight warming his face as he abruptly turned back. Then he squared his shoulders and forced one foot in front of the other, making his way toward Lia through the whispering grass.
Lia got up off the ground, quickly brushing off her long skirt. A twisted handkerchief held to her mouth with one hand.
“Justin Fairbanks.” She said his name with the cool enunciation of a judge, her face even paler than before, if that was possible. Lips tightly closed, her shoulders rising and falling slightly as if holding back agitated breath. Eyes narrowing ever so slightly either in recollection or disgust.
Justin swallowed the knot in his throat and stuck his hands awkwardly in his pockets, not knowing what to say. “So you found me,” he finally managed, his words coming out awkward and stiff. Scrubbing the grass harshly with one boot.
Wind whispered through the fir needles overhead with the glorious, heady scent of pine. But now it smelled all wrong—pungent, painful. Too perfect for him to stand before the daughter of the man he’d killed, the last of the season’s glass-blue gentians blooming around their feet.
When he dared to look up, Lia’s face had paled even more, and she bent over, clutching the fence post with one hand. Shoulders shaking as she clamped the handkerchief over her mouth.
And then, to Justin’s horror, Lia vomited in the bushes. Gasping and choking. Wiping her mouth as tears rolled down her cheeks.
Justin stood there stupidly, hands frozen in his pockets, and then took a hesitant step back. “Well, I’ll see ya,” he said, feeling like an idiot. “There’s a doc here at the camp. I’ll call him for you.”
And he turned to head back to the barracks. Wishing the CCC had shipped him to Alaska instead of Wyoming and wondering if there was any way he could get a transfer. Like … maybe now.
Lia called something after him, and Justin tipped his head back briefly. “What?”
“Carsick,” she gasped. “I’m horribly carsick.”
Justin scratched his head, his eyes scrunching in bewilderment.
“You know, like from the motion of a car,” she said with a bit more acid in her voice. “The roads are awful, all those ups and downs over the rocks, and Cynthia’s uncle drives like he’s …” She wiped her mouth with the handkerchief, her hand shaking. “Those new cars go so fast. Forty-five miles an hour is ridiculous.” Lia’s eyelids quivered shut. “We’ve been lost for five hours. Why do you think we just got here now?”
Justin realized she was waiting for him to respond. “Uh … what?” He let his hand rest on the top of his head.
“My friend Cynthia’s been dying to see her cousin Bruno, so her aunt and uncle drove to Yellowstone while we were in Montana.”
“Montana?” Was Lia delirious? Nothing she said made any sense.
“I’m finishing summer vacation with Cynthia’s family before school starts,” she said a bit indignantly, as if he were supposed to know. “They’ve got relatives in Bozeman. Didn’t Bruno say we were coming?”
Justin blinked the haze from his eyes long enough to shake his head in bewilderment. “How should I know? I don’t know Bruno Hodges any more than the man on the moon. Why, did … did you know I was here?” he asked, glancing up.
Lia looked away. “No.” She said it flatly, almost coldly.
Her slender throat bobbed slightly as she swallowed, the breeze blowing her hair ever so slightly. Chin up. Eyes focused far away.
They stood in uncomfortable silence as the spruce branches whispered again, wafting those dizzying smells of sun-warmed conifer needles and damp earth. A mountain bluebird warbled its distinctive trilly whistle, summerlike and earnest, like all the words Justin wanted to say and couldn’t.
His hands shook as he glanced at her, wondering if he’d been mistaken about who she was. Lia never stood out—a lot of girls looked like her.
But no, it was Lia Summers all right—probably nineteen or so now? Twenty, maybe? That dark hair that used to fall nearly to her waist, now cut and curled around her shoulders—styled sort of like the movie stars but longer, looser. The faintest touch of lipstick. Dark eyebrows and pale skin and blue, blue eyes.
To tell the truth, Lia had never been especially pretty. Her mouth was too big and her hair too fine, and she wore a perpetual baby face that always made her look about twelve years old. She stood like a beanpole, tallish and gangly.
But she had this … sparkle. A glow under her skin when she smiled. A confidence that bloomed pink in her cheeks when she shared about Jesus to the schoolkids—well spoken and unashamed.
Until that day he saw the light die in her eyes. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen when her father passed away, and small for her age. A scrawny slip of a girl, her cheeks still chubby with youth.
Lia opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, she heaved again—coughing into her handkerchief.
Justin winced, trying not to look at the handkerchief, and then peeled off his CCC bandanna and handed it to her.
She hesitated, and then to Justin’s astonishment, reached out and took it. Nodding her head in thanks before bending over double.
If Lia had come all the way from Bozeman by car, no wonder she was carsick.
“Do you want to … go see the doc?” Justin felt awkward again, finer points of conversation still eluding him. “He’s over there in that building. I’ll get him for ya.”
Lia nodded, arms wrapped around her middle. “I told Cynthia I was going to the bathroom, but—” She broke off, her face too green for conversation.
“Crackers?”
She turned those blue eyes toward him again in question.
“Soda crackers. You know, the kind you eat with soup. My sister Margaret swore they helped her seasickness when she went out on the lake.” Justin slapped his mouth shut, ashamed of his blabbering. Of course Lia knew Margaret was his sister. Everybody knew everybody in Berea, and they’d all gone to school together practically forever. Until Ma died first and then Pop, leaving nobody but Margaret and Justin to take care of Beanie.
And there’s no way Lia would want anything to eat after retching up breakfast for hours. What a ridiculous thing to ask.
Lia was nodding again.
“The crackers? You mean you … you want them?” Justin’s face brightened with inexplicable joy, like a flash of sunlight glancing off the Snake River.
“If you don’t mind. I’ll try anything.”
Justin’s heart leaped. For the first time in his life, he was going to do something right. True, it was just crackers—but if Lia had asked for an angry she-bear, Justin felt like he’d willingly chase one down and wrestle it for her.
“Wait here. Okay? I’ll come back.” Justin’s breath came fast, giddy, as he backed away, and then he broke into a frantic run toward the barracks.
Chapter 4
Lia Summers. What were the odds? Justin moved ghostlike through the scattered crowds who were heading to the bathhouse, laughing, stopping by the PX for a Pepsi or a smoke before formation and then dinner. Somebody reached out to trip him as a joke, waving a hand in his face, but Justin didn’t even look u
p. His eyes glazed, registering none of it.
Instead he saw the reverend’s simple walnut table the day he’d invited Justin over for dinner years ago—the light of compassion in his eyes so pure and strong that Justin felt, in his clumsy Bible ignorance, that he’d pulled out a chair across from God Himself. Mrs. Summers and little Miriam passed the biscuits, and the reverend spooned extra strawberry jam on Justin’s biscuit when he hesitated. Pushing him the whole glass jar.
“Take it home, son,” he said with a wink, resting his hand gently on Justin’s head. “I heard your father’s fond of strawberries. And you’re a good fellow. You’ll do it for him, won’t you?”
At the sound of the word father, Justin’s stomach buckled. Just how much did the reverend know anyhow?
“Naw, I couldn’t take something of yours, sir.” Justin felt like he’d forgotten how to talk, dropping his knife as he tried to cut off the thinnest slice of butter possible. After all, with the drought and Pop’s throwing the family money away on liquor, it had been ages since Justin had seen anything as beautiful as homemade jam. And made with white sugar! He tried not to look at it there in the cut-glass jar, quivering glorious red.
“Please, son. You’ll do us a favor. Isn’t that right, Lia?”
Justin glanced over at her as she sat straight in her chair, her face so refined and so confident—yet she’d refilled his glass three times without even waiting for thanks, never once making him ask. And not a second glance at his poorly bandaged hand or the ragged shirtsleeve he so desperately tried to hide in his lap.
All that pretty, curly hair of hers pulled back in a chocolate-brown ribbon, leaving tendrils on her cheek.
“Please, Papa. I’m sick of seeing strawberries after all those weeks of picking.” Lia twirled a curl of her hair around her finger like a young schoolgirl, an action that caused Justin to stare for a second, although he didn’t exactly know why. “Can’t you give him the rest? I know we’ve got two more back in the kitchen, and I can’t look at them another minute.”
The Timeless Love Romance Collection Page 47