Murky Pond

by T. L. Haddix

  “You two are too cute to be withstood this early in the morning,” she said when her parents looked up in greeting. “I can’t believe you’re still doing that. Shouldn’t you both be working?”

  They were sitting in the booth at the table in front of the window on the opposite side of the large room, Ainsley’s legs in Ben’s lap as they shared a plate of bacon and eggs and read the newspaper. It was a position she’d seen them in more times than she could count, and one that always restored her faith in humanity, at least in recent years.

  “Of course we still do this, and we’ve already been to work. You caught us having a snack.” Ainsley laughed as Lily filled a plate from the bowl of cut-up fruit on the counter, then added yogurt on the side. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Like a baby.” Lily joined them, reaching for the carafe of coffee as she sat down. “Even after all this time, it’s still odd that I’m not upstairs. But it’s nice too, to have my own space. One of these days I’ll move out, I promise.”

  When she turned nineteen, they’d set her up in the old mother-in-law suite where Byrdie had lived before she married Flaco and moved to his house a few miles down the road. The small wing had two bedrooms, a living room, an eat-in kitchen, and a private entrance that gave Lily a measure of freedom.

  Ben shook his head. “No need to rush things. Unlike Logan with his litter o’ kids,” he said, referring to his brother-in-law, “we aren’t eager to push you out of the nest.”

  Lily snorted as they all laughed. “Seriously, Dad, as soon as Colin had the first box moved, Logan was right over there in his face, and you know it.”

  Colin was the oldest child of Amelia, Ben’s baby sister. He was twenty-two, a few months younger than Lily, and while he’d been paying rent to his parents for close to four years, it had taken a bad breakup a few weeks back to get him uprooted and out of the nest. He hadn’t gone far, just to an apartment he’d put in over Logan and Amelia’s garage, but to hear Logan talk, the distance might as well have been to the moon and back.

  Given that Logan had spent the better part of those three-plus years teasing his son, coming up with new and increasingly outrageous ways to boot Colin out on his own without success, the entire family was taking great pleasure in giving Logan a hard time over his struggle with the separation.

  “He’s just worried,” Ben said. “Colin’s having a rough time right now.”

  “He’s better off without that heifer, and we all know that except him,” Lily said as she stirred cream into her coffee. “Break up, make up, do you love me or not? Five fricking years of that back and forth, just to salve her ego half the time, and then she up and marries another man. I’d go nuts. I mean, seriously. Put up or shut up. Milk the cow or get off the fence. Good riddance and God bless America.”

  Her timing was unfortunate, as Ben had just taken a large drink of his coffee, most of which came sputtering out his nose as he coughed and choked. “What the hell does that even mean?” he asked, his voice strangled. “Never mind. Don’t answer.”

  Ainsley grinned as she tried to help Ben clean up the mess he’d made. “Lily-belle, it isn’t that simple and you know it. He never expected her to actually marry someone else. That’s not going to be easy for him to deal with.”

  Lily saw the look that passed between her parents, and she sighed. “Mom, it’s not like you and Dad. Do you really think Becca ever loved him? I’ll eat my birthday hat if she did.”

  When Ainsley was nineteen, the summer she and Ben had met and fallen in love, she’d been forced into marrying someone else. She and Ben had gone their separate ways, not so much as crossing paths for five years. By then, she’d been widowed, and they’d been able to work through the scars of the past. They’d been together ever since.

  Ainsley raised her eyebrows. “It isn’t my place to say how she felt. She’s the only one who knows that.”

  Lily harrumphed, the non-answer telling her exactly what Ainsley thought. “So fill me in. What’s going on in the stables? Tell me about the new horses.”

  They lingered over breakfast, enjoying catching up, but eventually restlessness set in.

  “You know, we’ll be here all week,” Ainsley said, tongue in cheek. “Go see your babies. Us old fogeys will be around.”

  Ben gave Ainsley a sour stare, then he turned to Lily. “I don’t agree with the old fogey part, but your mother’s right. We’re not going anywhere.”

  Lily slid out of the booth and gave them both a kiss. “I adore you guys. I have my phone. Buzz if you need me.” She dropped her plate and theirs in the sink, then headed out the door.

  She didn’t get far down the path toward the barns, however, before uncertainty set in. She glanced down at the comfortable capris and T-shirt she wore with her clunky work boots. Did she really want her first meeting with Warren in more than six months to be while she was wearing such casual clothes?

  Closing her eyes, she cursed herself. “Lily, do you really think it matters? After all, the man’s seen you naked.”

  And that was the crux of the problem. Last year, during a family crisis and right before she’d left for Europe with her boss Agatha, Lily and Warren had spent the night together. The intimacy hadn’t been planned, and it had shaken her to her core. Like a cowardly chicken, she’d packed her bags and high-tailed it out of town. She hadn’t wanted to face what she’d done, what they’d done, to their friendship.

  From the time she’d been sixteen years old and met him for the first time, she’d loved Warren. She’d fallen in love with him when she was nineteen, but she’d hidden those feelings from most everyone, knowing his heart wasn’t open to her.

  She wasn’t strong enough to lose Warren completely, and she’d had little doubt that when they talked, she would end up losing him. Warren didn’t do permanent, and his heart still belonged to his late wife. After he and Lily had been together, she just couldn’t face the apologies, the regret she knew would come. The shame.

  She’d literally left his bed, gone home to pack, then fled.

  For Warren’s part, he’d tried to talk to her. He’d texted, he’d called. She’d let all the calls go to voice mail. She’d ignored the texts. Eventually, he’d given up.

  “Not the most mature way you could have handled that,” she said as she slowly walked to the first barn. That immaturity stung her conscience, as she’d striven to be as responsible as she could since she was a teenager.

  Her job as a companion to Agatha had kept her too busy to think about what had happened, at least most of the time. The elderly spitfire was one of Lily’s closest friends, in addition to being her boss, someone Lily thought of as a third grandmother. She was the only person Lily had told about the encounter.

  “Girl, you need to face the man and get this out of the way between you. If he’s as good a man as you say he is, he might just surprise you.” But she’d not nagged Lily to reach out to Warren. She’d supported Lily’s decision to stay quiet, even if she’d not approved.

  Now that Agatha was tucked away in a cottage in Maryland, near her nephews and niece, Lily was out of a job and out of excuses. She had to face Warren, at least if she wanted to come home. Given that her heart was rooted deeply in the soil of the farm, not coming home wasn’t an option. Even if it meant she was ripped apart, she had to face what she’d done. What they’d done.

  “I hope I’ve gotten stronger since last year,” she said as she reached the barn. “Otherwise, this is going to be a horrible, bloody mess of a homecoming.”

  Chapter Seven

  The sight of the tall blonde walking down from the house toward the barn stopped Warren in his tracks. To be perfectly honest, seeing Lily hit him like a punch to the gut, and it damn near doubled him over. He’d missed her so much in the last year, he felt as if a piece of his heart had been gone. The temptation to follow her to whichever exotic location she was at in any given week was so str
ong, he’d looked up flights half a dozen times. Whether he would have throttled her or kissed her if he’d found her, he couldn’t say. Possibly both.

  At the same time, ever since word had come that she was returning home, he’d been dreading having her back at the farm. He knew that would mean resolving the problems between them, and the resolution might well carve a gulf between them that would never be bridged.

  Deciding he wasn’t quite ready to face her, he reversed course.

  “Mickey, I’ll be down at the foaling barn if you need me,” he said as he hurried out the stable’s rear door, past the surprised young man who’d recently been promoted to assistant manager. Never mind that Warren had just spent two hours working in the foaling barn, a fact Mickey was well aware of. Warren would figure out something to do there if it killed him.

  The first time Warren met Lily, seven years earlier, he’d thought she was a grumpy barn owl. Not literally, but with her glasses on instead of contacts, blond hair a little wild around her head, and a slow, unfocused blink thanks to her not being quite awake at six in the morning, that was the first creature that had come into his mind. It was his first official day on the job, and he blamed the comparison on an uneasy night spent settling in.

  “You’re one of the helpers?” he asked as they encountered each other in the center aisle of the main barn.

  “Yes. I’m here to mix the feed.”

  Since it was his first day, she knew more about the farm’s operations than he did, so he followed her to the feed room, where Ben had shown him the dietary charts the day before. She moved slowly, yawning heavily every few steps it seemed, but she was very precise in her measurements. Nervous, Warren never thought to ask her name, and when he left a few minutes later to find Mickey, whom he’d be shadowing at first, he put her to the back of his mind.

  Later though, he asked Ben who the slow girl was. “Not mentally slow, but like she really should have stayed in bed another hour. I know hard work and getting up early builds character, but some of these kids… she shouldn’t be out on the road in that condition. Please tell me someone drives her here.”

  “The blonde girl? Tall, wears glasses?”

  “That’s her. Kind of looks like a disgruntled baby owl.”

  He could still see the stunned amusement on Ben’s face, hear his laughter. “She doesn’t get on the road that early. Her parents know better than to put her behind the wheel until she’s awake, which doesn’t happen until about nine or ten at least. That’s Lily. My daughter.” And he’d bent double laughing, both at the description and at Warren’s mortification.

  To make matters worse, for the life of him, Warren couldn’t remember her name. For the first week, he called her Daisy, until one morning she turned to him, her frown a perfect mirror of her mother’s.

  “Is it that you’re teasing me, or is it that you truly don’t know my name?” she asked. “Because it was cute at first, but now it’s starting to get annoying.”

  After hemming and hawing and trying to figure out a way not to have to admit he’d gotten her name wrong, he finally gave a shamefaced shrug. “I know it’s a flower.”

  She threw her hands in the air and growled, “Lily. I’m Lily. Lily white, Lily the flower, Tiger Lily… Doc Thompson calls me Lil’ Ainsley. Anything but a stupid daisy.” She stomped away, muttering about stubborn men who were too foolish to ask for directions or names.

  “You’re too young to have that attitude, Lily Campbell,” Warren called, genuinely amused.

  “Yeah, well, you say that because you’re not the lucky one who got stuck in the middle of nowhere last week with no cell service with my blasted father, who couldn’t figure out where in the devil we were and wouldn’t stop to ask for two hours.” She shot him a dirty look as she turned the corner.

  Warren was still chuckling five minutes later when Ainsley came in.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Your daughter. She’s not a morning person, is she? Or does she have a nice twin who comes in during the afternoons?”

  Ainsley laughed. “My sweet, darling girl, who really is one of the most lovely teenagers a mother could hope to ask for, is an absolute curmudgeon when she first wakes up. Most of us just step widely around her in the mornings. She’s not very interactive that early, and she knows her duties, so she doesn’t need supervision. Has she been giving you problems?”

  “Not at all. But have you tried giving her caffeine? Just out of curiosity?”

  She shook a finger at him, tsking. “You’ve been talking to Ben. No, not until she’s older. We’re hoping she’ll grow out of it eventually. He says he’ll give her another year and that’s it. After that, it’s Caffeine City.”

  Lily never had grown out of her early-morning grogginess, not unless something had changed while she was overseas. Warren had learned to keep the fridge in his office stocked with Coke and iced coffee blends. Despite their differences, he’d expected to have to hand out one of those drinks first thing this morning, but she’d not shown up at the crack of dawn.

  That he’d been checking his watch every ten minutes all morning was a fact that irritated him more than he could express.

  He made it halfway to the foaling barn before his phone rang.

  “Boss, sorry to call you back, but the farrier just pulled in.” There was concern and a measure of regret in Mickey’s voice.

  Warren cursed. He’d completely forgotten the appointment, what with the distraction of Lily’s arrival. “I’ll be right there. Thanks, Mick.”

  He turned the ATV around, calling himself ten kinds of fool as he drove back to the barn. Maybe it wouldn’t be awkward, this reunion with Lily. Maybe it would go smoothly and be like old times, back before he’d acted impetuously and ruined everything. Warren just wasn’t holding his breath for that to be the case.

  Chapter Eight

  Lily had never been so grateful to see the farrier in her life. She was so overjoyed, in fact, that she may have overdone her greeting a bit if the appreciative looks the man was giving her were any indication. Using Austin’s arrival as an excuse to avoid Warren, she stuck by his side as he got his tool belt on.

  Warren was waiting for them at the barn, his face stony. “Austin. How goes it?”

  As the men shook hands, Warren glanced at Lily with a brief nod, then turned his back on her, walking inside as he and Austin talked. Stunned, she stopped in her tracks. No, she really wasn’t surprised, but damn if that hadn’t hurt. Shame rose, as she wasn’t stupid enough to think she didn’t deserve the treatment, but with that knowledge came anger. She’d always had a decently bad temper that flared quickly before burning out, and she tried to tamp it down now.

  While Warren took care of the farrier, she made the rounds through the four barns, saying hello to Mickey and the horses, introducing herself to the new residents. She’d just reached the last barn when a whistle sounded from behind her. Bracing herself, she turned.

  Warren handed her a card. “Austin said to give him a call later if you aren’t busy. He’d like to take you to dinner. Welcome home, Lily.” He saluted her with two fingers to his forehead, and then he continued on, walking straight past her without another word.

  She stared after him as he made a fast track for the path that led into the woods toward his house. There had been so much fury on his face, it shook her. She knew he wasn’t happy with her, but she hadn’t expected that much emotion.

  “Put your big-girl panties on and deal with this, you stubborn Campbell,” she muttered. Hoping to God she didn’t end up making things worse, she started after him, nearly running to catch up. “Hang on a second, would you?” she called, nearly running to catch up.

  He didn’t stop until he was well into the woods, and then he turned so fast, she nearly ran into him. “Oh, hi! Gee, it’s good to see you. It’s been so long. You remember the last time we saw each other, right? You k
now, the night you snuck out of my bed?”

  Breath coming in pants, she stared at him as he glared at her. “Warren…”

  “Tell me, Lily, did you get a good laugh out of what happened between us? You and all your sophisticated friends, did you chuckle about how you fucked the stable boy? Or was it something you kept to yourself, a private notch on your bedpost?”

  She was shaking her head, even as her temper rose. “You ass. That’s not how it was and you know it!”

  He stepped closer to her, so close she could feel his breath dance across her face. “All I know is that we came together, and the next morning, you were gone. You wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t even acknowledge my existence. For eight months, I haven’t been worthy of your time. So why am I wasting mine on you now?” He snorted and turned as though to leave.

  Lily touched his arm as he passed. As soon as her hand brushed his skin, he froze, and then he was drawing her to him. His hand threaded into her hair as other his arm went around her waist, holding her close. She didn’t try to stop him or avoid the embrace. She needed to touch him too badly.

  “Do you know how hard I’ve had to try to get you out of my head?” he whispered, and then he kissed her.

  At first, it was a hard, punishing kiss, desperate and wounded, but when she returned the embrace instead of rejecting him, his touch gentled. It didn’t lose any intensity though, and they clung to each other. Several minutes passed before he drew back enough to study her face.

  “I didn’t use you,” she murmured when she could breathe enough to talk. “And what the hell was that line of shit about the sophisticated friends, the stable boy? You know me better than that, Warren Sullivan.”

  He let her go with a harsh laugh. “I thought I did.” The hands he ran through his hair shook a bit, but he didn’t try to hide that reaction. Instead, he held them out and looked at them as if trying to figure out a puzzle. “I need to get back to work. I have plans this weekend, and I have to get caught up first since I probably won’t be home until Monday.”