Com showed off his IV and the little red light blinking on his finger and the girls used the magnets on the white board to display the get well cards they’d drawn. Charlotte prayed the staff wouldn’t notice that one picture was of Prince String Bean eating a brown apple (Elsa explained the fruit was supposed to be from a can, but it looked like more like a small rodent) and the other was of an elk head mounted to a wall with a toothpick in its mouth. The gray smear above the illustrated toothpick gave the impression that the elk was smoking a cigarette.
She had to remind her daughters several times not to touch anything before Vic finally said, “Why don’t I take the girls down to the vending machine to get them a snack?”
“Get me some Pop-Tarts,” Commodore yelled to his son as Charlotte watched several nurses happily volunteer to escort Alex’s hunky father to the cafeteria.
“Us Russell men are cursed with these blasted good looks.” Commodore shook his head in disgust and Charlotte had to bite back her laughter. Other than similar coloring, Vic and Alex most assuredly did not take after the elderly Russell in the looks department. “Women can never leave us alone.”
Charlotte saw the opening and adjusted her headband before asking, “Then why was Alex’s mom able to leave so easily?”
The heart-rate monitor beside Commodore betrayed his attempt to nonchalantly wave his hand. “That gal wouldn’t have known a good thing if it’d bit her in her stuck-up city keister.”
“You didn’t like her?” Charlotte asked.
He sighed. “I saw through all her spiritual growth phony baloney a mile away. But she did give me my grandson and I’ll be forever grateful for that. Probably one of the few selfless things that woman ever did.”
“Do you think it still affects Alex? Like in his personal life?”
“I don’t see why it would,” Commodore huffed. “His Granola was all the mom he needed, up until she passed, rest her good soul. After that, his dad and I raised him right and he has plenty of friends. Could you imagine if the boy had grown up in New York with his mom? He’d have been miserable in the big city, going to snobby private schools and being forced to go to all those fancy society balls and what not.”
She studied the older man as she thought of the upcoming black tie event she was attending. No, she couldn’t imagine Alex fitting into that lifestyle. Her lifestyle. Leaving him was really for the best. For all of them.
“So, the girls and I are heading to the airport after this. But we’ll keep in touch and I’ll have them call you after your procedure tomorrow. Maybe we can come out to visit during the Christmas break.” Charlotte hoped Com couldn’t detect the false promise in her voice.
He sniffed and the toothpick Elsa had slipped him quivered ever so slightly. “I was hoping you wouldn’t take off so soon.”
She didn’t miss the implication that she would’ve left eventually. “Well, I have this article to finish and a bunch of work back home that needs my attention. And you guys are going to be so busy the rest of summer with all the business my magazine will be sending your way...”
“Does he know you’re leaving?” His steely green gaze left Charlotte with no doubt of who “he” was.
She looked at her small gold watch, the one her father’s assistant had sent her the day after her college graduation. She’d told herself that the gift was an extension of her parents’ love but its coldness was now weighing her wrist down. She slid the dainty timepiece off and put it in her tote bag. She’d created her own love, her own family, and it was time to get back to the life she’d made for her daughters.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Com said.
“I’m not sneaking away,” Charlotte defended herself for the second time today. “Alex will be relieved that I’ve gone back to San Francisco.”
“Will he?”
“It’s like you said. He belongs here in Sugar Falls.” Her throat constricted as she forced out the next words. “He doesn’t need me.”
“It don’t matter what he thinks he needs. What do you need?”
Charlotte needed to feel needed. How pathetic was that? She wanted to take care of Alex, to make a home for him. But unless he said otherwise, he was fine without her.
“I need you to rest and get better,” she said before leaning in and giving the man a kiss on his rough, paper thin cheek. Then, she did the only thing she could. She took care of her own heart and she left.
* * *
“So, just like that?” Alex snapped his fingers. “She said goodbye?”
He and Vic were sitting in the family lounge, waiting for Commodore to wake up from his nap following the angiogram. The cardiologist had said his grandfather wouldn’t need bypass surgery, but prescribed several new medications and a healthier diet—which would be enough to give the old man another heart attack. Com hated change.
And Alex was finding that he was a lot like his grandfather in that regard.
“She had to get back to work, son.” Vic shrugged his shoulders. The complacent gesture infuriated Alex.
“Did you at least try and talk her into staying?”
“When she told me she was leaving, we were in the hallway outside by the vending machines and I couldn’t say anything in front of the girls. Even if I could, it wasn’t my place.”
“Yeah, just like it wasn’t your place to talk my mom into staying, either.”
Vic looked up to the ceiling, the only telltale sign that Alex had flustered his dad. “Who says I didn’t try and talk her into it?”
“Actually, Dad, nobody actually said you didn’t, because we’ve never talked about it. Not once. And it’s not like I can ask Mariah Judge why she gave me up so easily before hightailing it back to New York before I was even a month old. She’s dead.”
“What did you want me to say?” Vic asked. “That she never wanted to be a mother? A wife? You never wanted to talk about it and I thought she’d made her decision pretty clear. She wasn’t like Charlotte, you know.”
Alex flinched at the comparison. “What do you mean?”
“There was nothing nurturing about Mariah. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but mothering doesn’t come naturally to every woman. When I met her, she was almost forty and I was this young college student from some mountain town in the middle of nowhere. Her life had been established and I’d barely had mine mapped out. She was beautiful and smart and hardworking, but she knew exactly what she wanted and you and I weren’t in the equation.”
“Did you try to convince her otherwise?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. I moved to New York City for all of a month and did a pretty good job of pretending that I didn’t hate it there. But there was no convincing Mariah. She sent me back with the promise that she’d return to Boise for her due date.”
“I’m surprised you got her to agree to leave New York again.”
“Well, she was writing speeches for a certain United States senator with a scandalous record and didn’t want the press to catch wind of her pregnancy and make any assumptions. But, after your grandfather showed her his birthing quilt, Mariah refused to be out of a five-mile range from the nearest modern hospital. So Boise it was.” Vic put his arm around Alex, squeezing his son’s shoulder. “Giving you to me didn’t make her a bad person. She couldn’t help who she was or how she felt. In fact, I think she must have loved you an awful lot to recognize that in herself and to completely entrust you to my care.”
The tightness in Alex’s chest loosened. “Did she at least attempt to stay in touch at all?”
He tried to tell himself that it didn’t matter. That he’d been better off being raised by his family in Sugar Falls.
Vic looked up to the ceiling again. “She called once, right before her book came out, to give me the heads-up and to explain why she never published anything specific about me. Or you.”
But saying the words out loud again didn’t have the same sting as they’d had when he was a kid with the thought passing through his mind.
“Actually, it was because she wanted to protect our privacy. She knew that I wasn’t comfortable with all that limelight and she wanted to be respectful of that. I know it must have felt that way. And I’ve always tried to make up for what she did. But from where I sat, I never saw her leaving you with me as an abandonment.” Vic pulled Alex in closer. “I saw it as a gift.”
“Excuse me,” a woman wearing surgical scrubs said, as she exited the recovery room, the blasting sound of Commodore yelling about his catheter coming from behind her. “You can come back and see Cuthbert now. If you really want to.”
The nurse’s tone indicated that she wouldn’t blame Vic and Alex if they pretended not to hear her or his grandfather’s bellowing and snuck away.
“Speaking of gifts,” Alex said, trying to lighten the mood. “Maybe we’ll wait until after he uses the restroom.”
The woman smiled, mostly at Vic, then retreated back into the recovery room.
His dad stood up and stretched. “Mariah set up a trust for you, you know.”
Alex did a double take. “Nobody’s ever mentioned anything about it before.”
“Well, like you said, we never really talked about your mother. I tried to broach the subject once when you turned eighteen, but I always got the impression that you didn’t want us ever bringing her up. Mariah was a big believer that people didn’t truly find themselves until they were out of their twenties, so it’s set up so that you can’t access it until you’re thirty-five.”
“I’ll be thirty-five in a year and a half, Dad.” He stood up. “When were you going to mention it?
Vic shrugged. “I was waiting for you to ask me about her.”
“Not that I want her money, but just out of curiosity, how much are we talking about?”
Vic named a figure and Alex had to sit down again. His dad laughed. “I guess her book is still pretty popular today.”
Alex thought about the irony of Charlotte reading Our Natural Souls, which she credited with the idea of inspiring her rafting trip. The rafting trip that Alex’s family needed to help promote business so they could make up the lost revenue from last year and pay off Com’s outstanding tax debt.
The rafting trip that had brought them together for the first time...
But Alex’s trust fund would easily pay off that debt several times, with plenty left over to buy a mansion in the heart of San Francisco. If that’s where he wanted to live. With Charlotte.
“Do you ever think about what your life would’ve been like if you would’ve moved to New York City?” he asked his dad.
“Nope. I don’t have to.” His dad put his arm around him again. “Because I went there and found out for myself. And I wasn’t even in love.”
“Who says I’m in love?”
“Why does everyone think I’m just a pretty face?” Vic shook his head. “Son, I may have only been a kid myself when you were born, but from the second you were in my arms, I’ve known when you’re hungry, when you’re tired, when you’re trying to hide your feelings.
“Do you remember when you locked yourself in the bottom half of the china cabinet so you wouldn’t have to go to Granola’s funeral? How hard you were crying, and you didn’t want anyone to see? I know when you’re scared and when you’re annoyed because you didn’t want me to invite Chuck Marconi on that mountain bike trip with us. But you never would have confronted him for being a bully if I hadn’t. I know when you’re too proud to ask for help and insist on going on the river even when a thunderstorm is coming.
“I know the difference between you liking some of the kids on your little league team and you letting yourself get close to a couple of charming little girls with big, inquisitive brown eyes and a lack of a strong male role model. And I sure as hell know when you’ve fallen for their mother.”
The pang of longing in Alex’s chest was as unexpected as it was intense, nearly robbing him of breath. He needed to see Charlotte. Just one more time. Just to be sure.
“By any chance would you know what I’d need to do to get her back?”
Chapter Twelve
It turned out that his father’s idea for getting Charlotte back involved questioning half the town of Sugar Falls for advice. And everyone at the Cowgirl Up Café had their own ridiculous suggestions.
Kylie had tried to talk Alex into buying a tuxedo before coming to San Francisco, but he wasn’t ready to commit to something so expensive and formal. He wasn’t even sure if he was willing to commit to moving to the city...or if that’s what Charlotte would want. Hell, it’d taken him an entire week to work up the nerve just to fly out here and talk to the woman.
But as he stood outside the Merchants Exchange Building in the Financial District, watching the limos drive up and the camera flashes illuminate the people on the red carpet, he told himself that he would find out if they had a future together. One way or another.
Pasting a bored expression on his face, he slipped past a throng of photographers and ducked behind one of the columns as he made his way through the outer doors. There was a crush of people just inside the entryway and he saw the security guard standing beside the elevator bank with a clipboard, probably checking names on his list. Alex’s gut dropped, realizing he might not have thought this out thoroughly. When Kylie and Freckles had come up with this stupid plan—and Commodore had challenged his manhood by betting him five bucks that he wouldn’t go through with it—it had never occurred to Alex that he might not get the chance to see Charlotte. To prove to her that he could fit into her world.
But as the crowd grew larger and his lungs seemed to grow smaller inside his rented tux, Alex wondered if he could actually pull this off. Infiltrating a formal, invitation-only gala in the heart of a major metropolis wasn’t the same as swinging by the Friday night fish fry at the Sugar Falls Elks Lodge. And convincing Charlotte that they belonged together wasn’t the same as convincing Com that instant mashed potatoes didn’t count as a vegetable. Actually, the former might be easier. Still, the doubt reverberating inside him was as uncomfortable as this ridiculous outfit. He looked at his reflection in a gilt framed mirror suspended on the wall in the lobby and checked out his footwear. At least Alex had had the foresight to wear his own boots.
He was about to hide out in the men’s room and give himself a better pep talk when he saw Classy Neal step into the building. Charlotte’s editor had sent Commodore a large floral arrangement after his release from the hospital, and while his grandfather had complained about the fussiness of the flowers and the wasted expense, Com had appreciated the editor’s thoughtful gift more than the fresh fruit basket Mrs. Cromartie of Auntie’s Antiques had delivered.
Neal would surely remember Alex and pull some strings to get him in the ballroom doors. Otherwise, he’d be forced to sit out in the lobby, waiting for Charlotte. Or worse, drive back home with his tail between his legs.
Several people were surrounding the editor of Fine Tastes and it took quite a few attempts for Alex to get the man’s attention. When he finally did, Alex had to reintroduce himself since the guy clearly didn’t remember him.
“I was Charlotte Folsom’s river guide out in Sugar Falls.”
“You’re kidding,” Neal said, studying him before turning to a young guy Alex recognized as the production assistant who’d come into the store to check out the tent colors. “If our readers thought the rugged mountain man was sexy in all that flannel, wait until they see him in Hugo Boss.”
Alex steeled his jaw and clenched his fists. He wasn’t here for a commentary on his appearance. Although, the reassurance was a sl
ight balm to his already fragile ego. “I’m looking for Charlotte but I don’t think she remembered to put me on the guest list.”
“Nonsense.” Neal did that finger steepling thing again. “Charlotte never forgets a list. But you’re here now and the opportunity for a good before and after picture is too big to pass up.”
The man pointed at his assistant. “Finn, go get one of the cameramen and meet us upstairs in the ballroom.”
Alex would’ve agreed to a cover shoot if it meant he could talk to Charlotte. Biting his tongue, he followed Neal into the elevator and rode with him and twenty or so other party goers up to the Julia Morgan Ballroom, pretending the ascent was the only thing making him sick to his stomach.
When Alex stepped out of the filigreed doors, he felt as though he was crossing into an alternate dimension. The glitz and the glamour were heavy on his eyes and he squinted to see past all the beautiful people in their beautiful clothes standing around the beautiful tables centered amidst the stunningly beautiful architecture. Luckily, he was able to ditch Neal, who’d stopped to talk to a herd of reporters standing in a roped-off area.
It was all too much for his hyped-up senses to take in. The ballroom was too warm, the orchestra was too loud and the passing wait staff were too quick. Alex thought about going to the bar to order a drink so he could calm down long enough to acclimate himself to his surroundings. Then he wondered if having a domestic beer would make him appear even more out of place. Man, he wanted to get the hell out of here. But he wanted to see Charlotte more.
Taking a deep breath, he told himself that if he could survive this, he could survive anything.
Alex put one foot in front of the other as if he were wearing hiking boots and starting a twelve-mile uphill trail, and made his way deeper into the crowd. It wasn’t until he was halfway across the room that he saw her.
Charlotte.
His legs froze and his pulse skyrocketed and every word of the speech he’d rehearsed on the ten hour drive out here floated up to the ornate gilded ceiling. She was even more beautiful than he’d remembered. Her dress was subtle, but unique. Black and satiny smooth, it had no sequins, no bows and not an ounce of excessive fabric. In fact, when she pivoted to speak with someone behind her, Alex’s breath caught at the bare skin exposed by the deep plunging back.
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