by Jodi Thomas
He cut the turkey as she leaned against his side and read the instructions.
As the sun brushed the lake, they sat down to the perfect Thanksgiving dinner. All the dishes lined the counter and a single candle sparkled on the tiny table.
Wyatt tasted everything and swore each dish was perfect. He’d never had corn bread dressing before, but pour enough gravy on it, and he’d have two helpings.
The night grew cold, but the house was warm with smells drifting thick as gauze though the room. He took in everything, building a memory that would last forever. Finally, he leaned back and declared he couldn’t eat another bite. “Best meal I ever had,” he bragged.
“Me, too.”
He thought of saying something like why don’t we do it again next year, but he might not be in the States next year, much less Texas. She might be married. The last thing he wanted was to have her waiting for him, even as a friend, and him not be able to show up.
They left the dishes on the table and moved to the couch. Jamie on one end. He on the other.
For once they didn’t turn on the TV or reach for a game. They just talked about how much fun cooking together had been and how they should have tried something a little simpler.
“Like turkey sandwiches,” he suggested.
“Oh, no. Next time we should put the names of all our favorite foods in a bag, shake it up and pull out three.” She laughed. “We’ll cook only those three, even if they don’t go together.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he said, knowing that there would be no next time.
“What if we get sick eating chili, ice cream and sardines?”
“Nobody likes sardines.”
She didn’t argue but he could almost hear her brain trying to think of things that would never go together.
“So this is what it’s like to be married, wife,” he finally said. “We cook all day, eat dinner and collapse.”
“We make a good team, Wyatt. It doesn’t really feel like pretend.”
“I agree. Sometimes it seems more real than any part of my life has ever been. It’s like my dreams and my reality traded places.”
Curling her legs up on the couch, she faced him. “You dream of being married?”
“I dream of coming home. I picture the peace of it. The calmness.”
“Is that what you want, Wyatt? Home? Peace? Calmness?”
“Isn’t that pretty much what everyone wants?”
She made a face that caused him to grin. “Not me,” she announced. “I’ve had calm and peace at home since I left college. I’ve had a job since the week after I graduated high school, sometimes two. I always saved as much of my money as I could. Lived cheap. Then once I had a few thousand dollars cash and a steady teaching job, I spent weeks looking for the perfect place to live. The place always had to be peaceful. Quiet. Each time I transferred schools, I did the same thing.”
“And now you’re tired of it?”
“Not tired, I just want more. I want an adventure. I’d give anything if I was like you and could travel the world.”
“Believe me, most of the places I go you’d be lucky to miss.” He was not going to talk about his world. The real world. The one he had to go back to in three days. He couldn’t bring any part of it into this perfection.
“Why don’t you try adventure, Jamie? There are Americans teaching all over the planet. There is nothing tying you down. You could go to Europe in the summers.”
She shrugged. “I’m not brave. Plus I could never pack up my things and store them. I know people probably think the yard art is just junk, but I’ve collected one piece from every town I’ve ever lived in. And my Precious Moments figurines remind me of students I’ve had. My mice tea sets are my heirlooms. I bought them at garage sales and antiques shops but treasure them as if a relative passed them down to me.”
Silence stretched between them. Finally, he risked a personal question. “Where did you grow up, Jamie?”
He didn’t think she would answer the simple question, but finally she said, “In foster homes and children’s homes across Texas. I had parents, they were just never around. At fourteen, I ended up in a children’s home in Amarillo. It was nice. The people were kind. When I graduated from high school, they encouraged me to start college and it wasn’t all that hard to work and study while I lived in the dorm. After all, I’d kind of lived in a dorm all my life. But when I started teaching, I knew I’d have to find a place alone where there was silence. Where I could live all by myself and not have to wake up to someone else’s alarm going off.
“I never had much growing up. When I moved, everything I owned usually fit in a suitcase and a box. So I started finding things to keep. Each serves as a memory, or a dream of a memory.” She shrugged. “I had a pretend life even before you came along.”
“What are you going to buy to remember the first Thanksgiving you’ve cooked?”
She lifted a stuffed turkey he’d picked up at the gas station, claiming that if the cooking didn’t work out, they could set the toy on the table and pretend as they ate cereal.
“Oh, no. That’s my turkey.” He reached for it.
The stuffed toy started gobbling and she quickly hid it behind her back. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law, remember. He’s telling you in turkey talk that he wants to stay with me.”
He circled her in a hug, but he didn’t pull the toy away from her. “Name your price. This memory is very special to me. I’ve got to have that turkey.”
They were so close he could feel the warmth of her. The softness of her. The adult game they now played was far more serious than the silly child’s game they were pretending to play.
“Okay.” She giggled. “I’ll let you have the turkey, but you have to give me another memory to keep.”
He moved away a few inches so he could see her face clearly. “Name it.”
“Kiss me, Wyatt. Kiss me like you’re not playing.”
He shoved off the couch. “I...I can’t.”
She moved back, curling into her corner. “I understand. You don’t want to. It’s all right. It was a dumb request. I’m sorry I asked.”
Wyatt stared at her. Hating that he’d hurt her. Hating himself for not stopping earlier.
Making up some reason why he couldn’t kiss her wouldn’t be easy. But he had to think up something. She’d know it wasn’t real, but maybe they’d both pretend it was. After all, they were getting very good at pretending.
But he had to be honest with her. She meant too much to him to be anything less. The whole reason he was here in her house might be a lie, but he couldn’t lie to Jamie. Not about this.
Anger boiled in him. The truth would change things.
“It’s not that I don’t want to kiss you.” His words came fast and hard. “I stay up hours after you close that damn bedroom door thinking about how I’d like to do a hell of a lot more than just kiss you. But, Jamie, it wouldn’t be right. You deserve more than a pretend husband.”
He turned to stare into the fireplace, not wanting to see the pain in her eyes. “If I leave with us being friends, I won’t have to think about you crying every night because some jerk, me, broke your heart.”
He was ruining what they had. He should have laughed it off or kissed her lightly and continued their pretending. He was shattering the fairy tale they’d been living for a week. “I don’t belong here. I live fifty weeks a year in a place where staying alive is my only goal. Two weeks a year I’m in the States, and a few of those times I’ve spent all my leave drunk.”
He was telling her too much. His life was not her problem. It wasn’t broken. She couldn’t fix it. Every woman he’d gotten close to had tried and failed.
But right now their pretend life was all he wanted. He’d do anything. Say anything to have them be friends until he had to leave.
But he’d r
uined it all.
When he turned around to apologize, she was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Midnight Crossing
THE SEVENTH DAY Mallory woke in Jax’s cabin, she no longer felt any fear. Jax still carried the rifle when he went outside, but the peace surrounding her slowly settled her mind. She had no doubt he was a kind man, a rare man.
As before, she was awake just before dawn and pretended to still be sleeping when he stumbled in half-asleep. He checked her blankets and put more wood on the fire. He had to be well into his thirties, but with his hair wild and his clothes tossed on, he looked almost like a kid.
She knew when he returned, twenty minutes later, he’d be showered and dressed, but it was touching that he checked on her welfare first.
After drifting off, Mallory woke again to the sounds of him cooking breakfast. She raised the head of her bed and watched as he burned the toast, as always. She couldn’t tell if he was talking to himself or Charlie, but his mumbling as he cooked made her smile.
This morning he brought his plate as well as hers and sat on the end of her bed so they could eat together.
“You like the bacon?” he asked when she’d finished her third slice.
She nodded.
Jax turned to the dog. “You see, Charlie, I told you that you have no taste in bacon.”
Handing him back an empty plate, she proved him right. Her appetite was back. She was recovering. His cooking wasn’t, but she’d learned to adjust. Once she covered the toast in butter and jelly, she barely tasted the burned side.
As he moved away, she began unwrapping the bandages on her leg, but it was hard to reach past her knee.
“I’ll help,” he said, moving toward her. “If you don’t mind and you’re sure you want to see what’s beneath? A few days ago it didn’t look near healed.”
She handed him the end of the bandage she’d been rolling up and he took over. Slowly, carefully, he lifted her leg, set it on his bended knee and removed the dressing.
For a moment, after he finished, she couldn’t look.
Mallory hadn’t seen the damage the first few times Nurse Toni cleaned the wounds. She’d only known that it must have been bad, because every inch seemed to hurt. When Jax changed it yesterday, she’d glanced but couldn’t bear to do more. His expression told her all she needed to know.
Now, holding her breath, she forced herself to look. Mallory couldn’t fight back the tears. Places looked skinned, so raw they were almost bloody. Other parts were black with deep bruises. They’d take weeks to heal. Now and then, there were breaks in the skin as if it had been torn and pulled so tight it just gave way in tiny jagged strips.
“It will heal,” he said as he reached for the cream the hospital had sent with her. “Okay if I put some of this on? It’ll help with the healing and decrease the chance of infection.”
Nodding, she leaned back on her pillow, thinking that nothing would help. Even after the wounds and bruises healed, she’d still be broken inside. She’d never trust anyone again.
She watched him through her tears as he gently applied the cream. His hands were caring, almost a caress.
Mallory tried to forget the night she’d felt the blows. Curtis had meant to cripple her. His words kept echoing in her mind. You’ll be sorry you ever thought of walking out on me.
Jax began unwrapping the other leg.
She didn’t move. It was too late to be embarrassed. He’d already seen the damage.
Tenderly he let the cream slide over her skin. She was almost asleep when he said, “If you’ll roll over, I’ll make sure the back of your legs are covered with cream.”
Slowly, awkwardly, she shifted, trying to keep the gown in place as she rolled to her stomach.
After a few minutes, he added, “Anywhere else?”
“My back,” she whispered in a rough voice that sounded like it came from someone else.
Her legs already seemed better after the cream had been applied. It was working.
She felt him untying the strings that held her gown together across her back. He would see all her wounds, now. The nurses had seen them, the doctor, even the sheriff, when he’d taken a few pictures for her file. And now Jax. Her almost-cousin.
“You want to know how your back looks?” His voice was calm, matter-of-fact.
She closed her eyes and waited.
“Toni said he used a bat. I see two long outlines of that and a few round bruises. I’m guessing that was where he poked you hard enough with the end of the bat to leave a bruise. That’s all. No other cuts or bruises.”
He’d guessed right. The last poke was when she’d lain still on the floor, too weak to fight anymore. She hadn’t even reacted when the tip of the bat tested to see if she would still recoil from the blows.
She’d been a limp rag doll after that, her brain barely registering the slaps and kicks. He’d grabbed her by the hair once and shoved her hard against the coffee table, trying to wake her up so he could continue what he’d called the lecture.
“Your back’s not as bad as I feared it might be,” Jax said as he retied the gown from her waist to the back of her neck. “You’re lucky he didn’t break your back.”
He helped her roll back over, then covered her with the blanket. “The cast on your arm will have to stay on, but I’ll wrap it in a plastic bag if you feel like taking a shower on one of the days that Toni isn’t dropping by.”
She thanked him with a touch to her chin.
The next morning, Mallory was ready for Toni when she arrived complaining about how hard the cabin was to find. The nurse helped her shower and wash her hair. The bruises on her face made her look like a monster, but she couldn’t stand the thought of hiding behind bandages any longer. Both her eyes were swollen but open. She was making progress.
Toni combed her hair and helped her into warm flannel pajamas two sizes too big. “You’ll feel a little better each day from now on. By the time you come in to have the cast taken off, the bruises will be little more than shadows.”
Mallory nodded and kissed the nurse’s hand.
Toni looked like she wanted to hug her but didn’t try. “I’ll be back in two days with a change of clothes. Jax and I are staying in touch with email. He’ll let me know if you run low on meds.”
Mallory nodded. She’d never worn flannel pajamas in her life, but they felt so soft against her skin she decided, from now on, they would be her only nightclothes.
That afternoon when Tim dropped by with groceries, she heard the writer whisper to Jax that they needed to talk outside. Tim barely looked at her.
Something was wrong, she decided. Something they didn’t want her to hear. When they came back in, she pretended to be asleep. Tim didn’t stay long.
Trouble whispered through the quiet cabin for the first time.
Jax worked at his computer as always, seemingly keeping a close eye on her, but fear built in her. If Curtis found her, he’d be furious. The first thing he’d do when he found her was hurt her so she’d be too afraid to move, then he’d kill Charlie.
Fear shivered through her. If anyone tried to stop Curtis, he’d hurt them, too. His mood would turn as black as midnight.
She remembered crawling to the back door after Curtis went to bed that night. He hadn’t even checked to see if she had been still breathing. He hadn’t cared.
She’d heard Charlie whining outside in the cold and had to move. All she’d planned to do was let her dog in before he froze, but once the cold air greeted her, Mallory’s survival instincts woke up.
Charlie stayed right by her side as she grabbed Curtis’s keys and stumbled to his car, her eyes almost swollen closed, her heart pounding in fear of another blow hitting her from behind as she ran.
All she’d been thinking about was getting as far away as possible. One more hit, one more kick, mig
ht end her life. Or the dog’s.
They’d made it to the car. Charlie barked as she fumbled for the right key. As the engine roared, she slammed the car door and raced out of the drive, afraid to look back.
Ten miles. Twenty. A hundred. Mallory had just kept driving. She’d felt one eye swelling closed. She’d lost the use of one arm, but she kept going. She didn’t even remember missing the curve on the road. She only remembered flying for a moment before the world went black.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Maverick Ranch
A FEW DAYS before Thanksgiving, Griffin’s cell rang when he stepped out of the shower. He grabbed a towel and ran the length of his bedroom to catch it in time.
The name Sunshine flashed across the screen. She’d said she’d call before she took off from Misty Bend, but he hadn’t expected her to leave before dawn.
“Hello,” he greeted her. “I’m about ready to see you again, Sunshine. Dinner with the brothers is no fun without you.” In truth, he’d been working so hard it hadn’t seemed like a week had passed since she’d left.
“Griff, I’m not coming.” Her voice came fast, panicked. Her words choppy as if she were running while she shouted into the phone. “The barn where we keep the mares ready to foal caught fire during the storm before dawn. We thought we had it contained but we didn’t... Several of the mares are hurt. I can’t leave. I can’t talk now. There’s too much to do. I’ll call you later.”
The phone went dead.
Griffin grabbed his clothes, opened his door and yelled for Cooper as he dressed.
“Yeah, I’m coming.” From the thud’s echo on the other side of Cooper’s bedroom door, it sounded more like he fell out of bed.
“Elliot, you up?” Griffin shouted.
“No.” Elliot calmly opened his door down the hallway. He was fully dressed.
Griffin wondered if his brother slept in his clothes, or even if he’d left his computer long enough to sleep.
Buttoning his shirt, Griffin faced them. “Sunlan’s barn is on fire. She’s got a mess up at her place. Hurt horses. Possibly premature dropping of foals. I’m calling in that favor from Kirkland. His new plane should get me there fast. Elliot, pull up my truck. You’re driving me over. Cooper, load all the medical supplies that might be helpful. I’ll be dealing with burns, birthing and blizzard conditions.”