Evergreen Springs

by RaeAnne Thayne

  While Cole sat there like a stupid lump—there was that half-functioning brain again—Devin scooped up the boy and raced to the downstairs bathroom in the hallway. A moment later, they heard the unmistakable sounds of Ty losing whatever he had eaten for dinner.

  Unfortunately, it brought back too many memories of his drinking days. Why the hell had he ever found it appealing to get loaded, knowing what would come later? He had wasted far too much of his life as a selfish, immature ass, thinking he could drink away the emptiness inside him.

  “Let’s get these dishes cleared away,” he said to Jazmyn.

  He had to give his daughter credit. For once, she stepped right up and helped him carry the empty dishes to the sink. She even rinsed them and loaded them in the dishwasher.

  Only after she scooped the remaining casserole into a smaller plastic container and set it in the refrigerator without saying much of anything did he notice she was looking a little pale, too.

  “You’re not going to be sick on me, too, are you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I feel fine. What about Ty? Will he be okay?”

  “He’s just got an upset stomach,” he answered. “Maybe he ate a few too many snickerdoodles.”

  “He only had one. That’s all Devin would let us have before dinner.”

  She still looked nervous and he rested a reassuring hand on her slender shoulder. “He’ll be fine,” he said quietly. “Remember, Devin’s a doctor. She’ll take care of him.

  For once, she didn’t push him away. He almost thought maybe she even leaned into his hand a little. Progress in tiny steps, he told himself.

  “If you want to go watch the show you were talking about earlier, I can finish up in here.”

  “Okay,” she said in a small voice.

  “Do you need my help finding it?”

  “No. I’m not a baby,” she snapped.

  Ah. There was his prickly daughter again. She headed into the TV room, though he saw her send a couple of worried looks to the bathroom on her way.

  Cole waited in the hallway, feeling helpless in every damn part of his life. A few moments later, Devin emerged alone, leaving the door ajar. Behind her, he could hear water running and steam escaped with her. Strands of hair had escaped from her ponytail to curl enticingly around her face from the humid air, a fact he immediately chided himself for noticing.

  “Is he still throwing up?” he asked.

  She gave him a slight smile “I think we’re done. He’s having a warm shower now. We could use clean pajamas and underwear in here.”

  “I’ll grab them,” he said. He headed into the laundry room, where most of the clean clothes were still in baskets. It was all he could do to wash a few loads after the kids were in bed—forget about folding and putting them away at this point in his life.

  He found a pair of pajamas with Ninja Turtles on them and a clean pair of Ty-sized briefs. When he returned to the hallway outside the bathroom, he saw Devin inside, wrapping Ty in a big bath towel.

  The boy rested his head on her shoulder as if he was too tired and miserable to summon energy for anything else. The sight of her there, kneeling on his bathroom floor and embracing his sick kid, did funny things to his insides, things he didn’t want to identify.

  “Here you go,” he said gruffly.

  She took the briefs and pajamas from him with a soft smile, then helped Ty into them.

  “Let’s get you up to bed,” she said.

  “I’m not tired,” the boy protested, already half-asleep.

  “I’ve got you, kiddo.”

  He picked up the boy—this sweet child he loved so dearly, even though he was 99 percent sure Ty possessed not a shred of Cole’s own DNA—and carried him up the stairs. He pushed through the doorway. Devin moved ahead of him and pulled away the covers of the bed so Cole could set him down between the sheets.

  “How’s your tummy now?” Devin asked.

  “I don’t know. Okay, I guess. I didn’t eat my dinner.”

  “If you’re hungry, we can bring up some toast or some crackers.”

  “No,” he said, his eyes drooping.

  “Just get some rest, then,” Cole said. “I’ll leave your door open so I can hear you if you wake up and start feeling sick again.”

  Ty nodded and gave a sleepy smile, then closed his eyes the rest of the way. Cole stood watching him for a moment—the veins through the translucent skin of his eyelids, the easy rise and fall of his little chest in his pajamas—and tried not to give in to the panic crawling through him.

  He didn’t know what to do in these situations. Tylenol? Antacids? What did you do for a kid who was throwing up? He didn’t know the first thing.

  He had a feeling Devin suspected some of what was racing through his mind. Out in the hallway, she reached a hand out and touched his arm, just for a moment, but he wanted to lean into her as Ty had done.

  “Do you mind if I stick around a bit to keep an eye on him?” she asked. “I think he just has a stomach bug. He was a little warm, nothing too unusual, but I’d like to make sure he doesn’t suddenly spike a fever.”

  Relief swamped him and he wanted to kiss her. At least he wouldn’t have to figure out the illness on his own. “I would appreciate that very much. Thank you.”

  “I won’t stay long. I’ve got to head back to the hospital to check on a few patients.”

  She led the way downstairs just as Jazmyn came out of the TV room to see what was going on.

  “Is he still throwing up?” she asked.

  Devin shook her head. “No. He’s sleeping now.”

  He could almost see his daughter’s busy little mind trying to work the angles.

  “I’m worried about him,” Jaz finally said solemnly. “I know it’s close to my bedtime but I think I should stay up awhile longer, just to make sure he’s okay.”

  Oh, she was a tricky one. “Yeah. Nice try,” he growled. “Time for your shower now. Go on.”

  She drew in a breath for an argument and he braced himself for what was coming. Jazmyn rarely obeyed anything he said.

  A good horse trainer had to establish a rapport with an animal, a relationship of trust while still having a firm hand. Yeah, he knew kids weren’t the same as horses but he believed some of the principles held true.

  Over the past few months, he had failed on all counts when it came to his daughter. At first, he had let her get away with some of her negative behavior because he knew she was grieving for her mother. Now she seemed to have established a bad pattern and both of them knew he wasn’t the one in control.

  He was going to have to make some changes but not tonight with the lovely doctor looking on.

  Much to his relief, Devin once more stepped in to avert the impending crisis. “If you hurry and shower before I have to leave for the hospital, maybe I can read Sparkle and the Magic Snowball. It’s quickly becoming my favorite Christmas story.”

  Jazmyn’s eyes lit up. “Do you have it? My teacher read that one in class and I loved it.”

  “You’re in luck,” Devin said. “I have a copy on my tablet. It’s not the same as flipping the pages and seeing all the beautiful illustrations but it will do in a pinch.”

  Jazmyn looked delighted. “Yay! I’ll hurry.”

  She practically galloped up the stairs, leaving Cole to gape after her.

  “How do you do that so easily?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “All of it. A sick kid and a stubborn one. You’ve got an answer for every situation.”

  “I’m used to sick kids. It’s kind of my business to know what to do for them, so taking care of Ty came naturally.”

  “And Jazmyn? How do you know just the right buttons to push with Jazmyn? She’s not the easiest child in the world.”

&n
bsp; “No,” Devin said. “But I like her. She’s a great kid.”

  “She is,” he agreed. “Not everybody sees that, though.”

  “Once you understand her, it’s easy. It’s obvious she hides her uncertainties, her grief, her fear by trying to control everything around her. I get that, believe me.”

  He stared at her, stunned by her perceptiveness. “She does! That’s exactly it! She has to be the one in charge every frigging minute and has an opinion on everything. It drives me crazy.”

  “Because deep down, she knows she isn’t really in control of anything.”

  Two months of frustration and difficulty suddenly seemed to come into clear, vivid focus. A moment of insight just rocked his entire relationship with his daughter and gave him a completely new perspective.

  “I can’t believe I never realized that before. You’re exactly right! Damn, you’re good.”

  She gave a little laugh. “No. I just know what it’s like to feel scared and out of control.”

  As soon as she said the words, she immediately looked as if she wished she could call them back.

  When had she felt out of control? What were those secrets he sensed in her eyes?

  He was intensely curious about this woman and her compassion and understanding. He opened his mouth to probe a little but she cut him off with questions of her own. He had a feeling she was turning the tables so he couldn’t look too closely into her psyche.

  “So your father,” she began. “What’s the story there? Why is he barred from talking to your kids?”

  He tensed, as he always did when the topic of conversation involved Stan.

  “It’s a long and ugly story. Why ruin a lovely dinner? Even one that ended up with a six-year-old yakking up?”

  She smiled a little, though she gave him a probing look.

  “Why indeed,” she murmured.

  He suddenly wanted to tell her, with a contrariness that was more like Jazmyn than him. Stan could be charming and persuasive—he’d been a corporate attorney, after all. Devin probably thought he, Cole, was being completely unreasonable about the situation, keeping his children from a man who only wanted to forge a relationship with them.

  He didn’t want her thinking poorly of him—well, more poorly than she probably already did, considering he was obviously way, way out of his depth with his own family.

  “My mom died of a rare and aggressive cancer when I was eleven. Tricia was only seven.”

  Her mouth flattened into a thin line and her shoulders seemed to tighten. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Mom was...pretty wonderful. I guess all kids think their mothers are awesome, but ours really was. The kind of mom all the other kids wanted, who played out in the yard with us and made blanket tents in front of the fire on rainy days and taught us how to love books and music and art. Losing her was devastating.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  “It was a tough time,” he said. “Instead of reaching out to comfort his grieving children at the loss of their mother, as most fathers might do—as I’m trying to do—Stan focused only on himself, as usual. He’d just taken a high-powered new job overseas and decided two grieving kids would only get in the way. So the day after her funeral—Christmas Eve, actually—he dropped us off here with his parents at Evergreen Springs and then proceeded to completely forget about us.”

  “I had wondered how you came to live with your grandparents.”

  “Yeah. Great story, isn’t it? The challenges of single fatherhood were apparently more than Stan wanted to take on. It was easier to simply dump his responsibilities on someone else and be done with it. We barely knew our grandparents. Before that, I’d been to the ranch no more than a handful of times my entire life. Now suddenly we were living with them. After he left us here, we heard from Stan maybe once or twice a year—if that.”

  “It must have seemed as if you lost two parents the day your mother died.”

  “Exactly. That’s just how it felt.”

  He hadn’t shared this with his sister and didn’t want to admit it, even to himself, but the past two months had actually given him a shade more compassion for his father—at least a little more than he had before he claimed full responsibility for his children.

  This parenting gig was hard. Being a single father was even harder, having no one else to share the load and feeling overwhelmed every damn minute.

  Cole still didn’t see that as reason enough for Stan to abandon his responsibilities.

  “Has he reached out to you over the years?”

  “A few times. Obviously nothing with any meat behind it.”

  His father had tried to get Cole an attorney from his own firm to represent him in the criminal trial. He had refused on principle, not willing to take anything from the bastard, even a referral.

  Maybe if he had swallowed his pride a little, he might have been able to beat the charges against him, or at least received a reduced sentence. Self-defense would have been a viable argument, since he hadn’t been the one to start the altercation.

  He wasn’t going to second-guess himself at this late date, though.

  “Why has he come to Evergreen Springs?” Devin asked.

  “Who knows? If I had to guess, I would say that he’s suddenly hitting an age when he realizes he’s alone in the world and he apparently thinks he can come back in and make everything right again. He thinks if he sticks around and keeps hammering and hammering at me, I’ll just let him into my children’s lives for some kind of do-over. Screw that. I don’t care what it takes—I won’t let him hurt them, too.”

  * * *

  UNDERNEATH THE IMPLACABLE TONE, Devin heard something else in Cole’s voice—a thin, barely detectable strain of old pain.

  Her heart ached as she pictured him as a grieving boy being abandoned by his father, dropped off with people he barely knew. No matter how loving his grandparents might have been, any child must have wondered why he couldn’t live with his father.

  She had known Tricia was raised by her grandparents but for some reason, it never occurred to her to ask why. The selfishness of that omission was beyond mortifying.

  She wanted to hug both Cole and Tricia now. In some ways, the situation wasn’t unlike what Devin’s sister, McKenzie, had faced when she came to Haven Point at around that same age to live with the father she had never met.

  It had been quite the scandal in Haven Point at the time. Devin’s father had also been an attorney—she and Cole shared that. Richard Shaw had been well respected and well liked. When his half-Latina love child showed up out of the blue, tongues had certainly wagged all over town.

  Devin had been twelve, old enough to understand that her father had done something very wrong. Xochitl Vargas—McKenzie’s name before it had been legally changed after she came to live with them—was younger than Devin. Even she had understood her father had cheated on her mother and none of them could escape the whispers around Haven Point.

  Her mother had agreed to let the young girl live with them after her mother’s death but she hadn’t been happy about it. The coldness in her house for those first few months had been devastating.

  But Devin had also understood, even at twelve, that none of it was Xochitl’s fault. Her half sister was an innocent, frightened girl who had just lost her mother. Devin had loved Xochitl/McKenzie from the beginning for her courage and strength and loved her even more now. She deeply admired how hard her sister had struggled to carve a place for herself in Haven Point.

  Because of that, Devin had an added measure of compassion for the tumult Cole and his sister must have gone through when their world suddenly upended—and the scars that could leave behind.

  She was a healer by nature, though, and that strain of hurt haunted her. If his father wanted to try making amends now, didn’t that sh
ow he regretted what he had done? If Cole could find it in his heart to let his father inside his life a little, perhaps both of them could manage to find some sort of peace.

  “You’re in a tough situation now, with Tricia in the hospital,” she said, choosing her words with care. “Couldn’t you use his help with the children, if he’s willing to give it? Even after you hire a permanent housekeeper and Tricia comes back from the hospital, it never hurts to have a little wider support network.”

  A muscle flexed in his jaw and he looked as tough and dangerous as an Old West outlaw. “It wouldn’t matter if I were caught in an avalanche up in the Redemptions. I still wouldn’t want his help.”

  “Does a suffocating man really care who’s digging him out?”

  “He does, if he knows the guy on the other side of the shovel tossed him over the cliff a long time ago and walked away without looking back.”

  She saw his point. She also saw a man who seemed very alone in the world right now and in need of assistance wherever he could find it. If his father was here wanting to extend a hand to his son and grandchildren, it made perfect sense to her that Cole should take advantage of that.

  That echo of old sadness she had heard in his voice haunted her. She wanted so much to make it better, though she knew she didn’t possess that power.

  Medical school had taught her early the grim realization that she simply couldn’t fix everything. Sometimes the best she could do was hold someone’s hand and offer what small comfort she had.

  Before she could do anything, Jazmyn hurried down the stairs wearing a flowered flannel nightgown and fuzzy blue slippers. Her hair hung in wet strands around her face and she looked as if she’d barely dried off before dressing.

  “Okay,” she chirped. “I had my shower. Can you read to me now?”

  “How about we get those tangles out of your hair first?” Devin suggested. “You can read to me while I do it, from whatever book you want. Go find a book and a comb and I’ll meet you in your lovely room.”

  “Do we have to comb my hair? It hurts.”

  “Yes,” her father said firmly.