Harlequin Special Edition July 2013 - Bundle 2 of 2: The Widow of Conard CountyA Match for the Single DadThe Medic's Homecoming

by Rachel Lee

  “That’s not good.”

  “No, it’s not. Hey, are you afraid of a squabble?”

  He astonished her then by laughing. “No,” he admitted.

  “So talk. Squabbles are useful, too.”

  “Okay. I remember there was something I was going to tell you when we were coming home from town, but I can’t remember what. Losing my train of thought frustrates me. It makes me mad. So I started painting to work it out in a safe way.”

  “You’ve been painting like a demon.”

  “Maybe not smart. Working keeps the frustration down, but it lets my head wander too much. And then I get aware that I get lost sometimes in what I’m thinking, just the way I get lost when I’m talking.”

  “And that makes you madder.”

  He stared at the sandwich he held. “I can remember not being this way. Sometimes I think it would be better if I couldn’t remember at all.”

  That was so unutterably sad that she felt her eyes burn again. “Liam?” Her voice sounded choked.

  “What?”

  “I’m glad you can remember even if it’s hard. Even if it hurts. Even if it frustrates you. Without a memory...you wouldn’t be you anymore. And I like you.”

  His head snapped up, his odd light green eyes fixing on her. “I’m not very likable.”

  “Says who?”

  “Plenty of people.”

  “Tell me one.” It wasn’t a challenge; in fact, she kept her voice calm and even gentle.

  “I don’t need to tell you one. I can tell you lots. The ones who called me mental and stupid.”

  She bit her lip, and now the burning in her eyes transformed into an ache in her heart. “Those people don’t know you and they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  “They know what they see. That’s how I look.”

  “Not to me. Not even the first time we met.” Her throat now hurt as if a noose was wrapped around it. Oh, God, she didn’t want to break down and cry. He might misread it.

  “I like painting. I’m not stupid when I do that.”

  She swallowed the pain she felt for him. “No, you’re not. In fact, you’re pretty damn good.”

  “I remembered how.”

  “Exactly. No help from anyone.”

  He nodded slowly. “But what’s next again?”

  “The barn needs paint over the primer.”

  “Right.” He repeated the words. “As soon as I finish.”

  “Ed will deliver the paint tomorrow.”

  “Good. Then what?”

  “Should we make a list?” At least he wasn’t talking about hitting the road again, although she suspected that might come back.

  He met her gaze again. “I’d like to try to remember. If I forget again, then we can make a list.”

  Her chest swelled as she realized he was back to making an effort, that he’d stopped trying to hide his frustration, stopped trying to hide from her, stopped trying to think leaving was the only answer. “Sounds good to me.”

  He resumed eating and she didn’t press him again. Her own stomach had loosened up enough that she felt able to take a bite of her sandwich.

  Then he surprised her. “Let’s make a list,” he said. “A long list of all the things you want done. After the barn. The longer the better.”

  “Sure.” She didn’t question him. Maybe the list would give him a sense that he had a direction and a plan beyond tomorrow. It sounded like a good idea, actually. Maybe she ought to make one for herself, too. Things that she could do that she should have been doing. Giving up on the ranch because her dream with Chet had vanished might not have been wise.

  No, maybe not. Maybe she should have gone ahead with as much of the dream as she could manage on her own, because it had been her dream, too, not just Chet’s.

  She spoke. “Should you give up a dream of your own just because the person you shared it with is gone?”

  “No.” The answer came surprisingly fast.

  She lifted her eyes to him. “What are your dreams, Liam?”

  “Feeling normal again, even if I’m not.”

  “That’s a good one. I think you’ll get at least that far, if not well beyond it.”

  “I hope so. What dream are you talking about?”

  “Having some livestock here. Maybe I can’t do the whole rescue thing, but I could get a couple of goats.”

  “Why couldn’t you do the rescue thing?”

  She smiled wryly. “Because the way Chet had it planned out, it was going to be a full-time job for at least one of us. I still have to teach this fall.”

  He nodded. “That was going to be his retirement.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “But it wasn’t just his dream.”

  “Not at all. I wanted it, too. He just kept making it bigger and bigger.”

  Liam chuckled. “For a fact. I listened to it. So start small. I can help at least for now. I think Chet always intended to drag me into this.”

  A little bubble of laughter escaped her. “I think you’re right. I lost count of the times we’d be talking about those plans and out would come, ‘Liam and I will...’ How did you feel about that?”

  “Truthfully? It was nice that he wanted me to be part of it, but I wasn’t really sure it was my thing. How would I know? I was a city kid.”

  “But he dragged you into helping in Afghanistan.”

  “He sure did. I liked it, too.”

  “So maybe I’ll put that on my personal to-do list. Get a few goats to start. I’ll see how it goes.”

  “And if you don’t like it?”

  “I have a neighbor,” she said dryly. “He probably wouldn’t mind a few extra goats, especially since I’ll likely buy these from him.”

  He smiled, and she realized that whatever had been bugging him seemed to have passed.

  Good, she thought as he returned to finish the barn. It would probably only take him an hour or so at this point. But she couldn’t stop remembering his words, it’s not right to want your best friend’s wife.

  They drummed in her head and seemed to pulse between her legs. She shouldn’t want her husband’s best friend, either.

  But the situation had changed. Afghanistan had changed it irrevocably.

  * * *

  “We didn’t have kids,” she announced over dinner to Liam. Why, she didn’t know. Maybe because she was thinking about giving Ransom a call and he had children. Everyone, just about, had children.

  “Why not?” he asked. He seemed to like the roast chicken and green bean casserole as much as Chet had.

  “Because... You know, sometimes I wonder if I was selfish.”

  His expression grew perplexed. “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t want to have any children as long as Chet was going into combat. I didn’t want to raise a child alone.”

  “Did that bother him?”

  Apparently, this was something Chet had never discussed with his best friend. In some way it relieved her to know that some things had remained between the two of them, unlike paint chips and fabric samples. “He said he understood.”

  Liam pondered that. “Chet didn’t lie.”

  “No, he didn’t. So we waited.” She stared into space, remembering. It had seemed to make so much sense at the time, but now she wondered. What if she’d had a small version of Chet running around for the past year and a half? Would it have helped? Would she have had something more important to focus on than herself?

  And then there was the fact that now there was nothing of Chet left but this ranch. Would he have been content with that legacy?

  “Do you feel bad about it now?”

  The question called her back. “I’m not sure. It seems wrong somehow that he didn’t leave a son.”

  “It might have been a girl,” he said bluntly. “And either way, the kid would never have really known him. So what are you talking about here? Genes?”

  God, he could be blunt. He’d warned her, after all.

  “We
ll, that sounds stupid,” she said irritably.

  “Just reducing it to the bottom line. The gene thing? A lot of people get hung up on that. I get it. But considering that I read somewhere that we’re all more closely related than we’d believe, it also gets a little silly. Last name carried on? Well, maybe you’ll find a guy who’d be willing to let a child carry Chet’s last name.”

  She gaped at him. This conversation was going sideways fast, heading to places she never would have imagined. “Yeah, right,” she said finally.

  “I would,” he said with a shrug. “What’s a name? How many people named Majors are there in the world? Thousands probably. The world is overrun with O’Connors.”

  “You,” she said, “are something else.”

  “Why? Because I don’t get hung up on this whole thing? I guess. A lot of people think it’s important. I just never figured it that way. I read somewhere that you can’t take a genealogy back more than four hundred years because everybody starts being related to you. Two thousand years and everybody on the planet is related. So Chet’s genes are out there in lots of places. After all, he got them from somewhere. That leaves a name.”

  “That also leaves,” she said tautly, “an emotional connection.”

  His expression dimmed. “I just put my foot in it again, didn’t I?”

  At once she felt that squeezing ache that was becoming all too familiar with him. She didn’t want him to feel bad, and she knew she wasn’t being entirely rational. This thought had reared up to plague her more than once since Chet’s passing, and why the hell it had come up tonight she wasn’t sure. Except that she was thinking about getting goats, and getting goats from Ransom probably meant he’d show up with his son to help and...and what?

  “I’m sorry you regret it,” he said. “I was stupid to talk that way.”

  “You’re not stupid,” she said, expressing her pain with a little anger. “Stop saying that!”

  “I made you mad. Maybe hurt you.”

  “You didn’t hurt me.” She wanted to put her head in her hands and find a way through this morass she had just created. Instead, she sought a plateau within herself, the place where she could remain calm even when she had twenty kids in a classroom erupting simultaneously. “You were being logical.”

  “And you reminded me that logic isn’t always right.”

  “It’s different, is all.” Bit by bit she was finding her equilibrium. “You’re right. I made a decision. Chet agreed with it. It’s ridiculous at this point to regret it. It is what it is. And logically you’re right about what it means. But emotionally I sometimes wish I still had that connection with Chet. It’s an emotional tug I can’t explain very well. It’s just there sometimes. But when I’m not feeling it the way I am tonight, I can see that maybe we weren’t wrong to choose to wait. I’d have a little child now who would be fatherless. I’d have more to deal with and I haven’t exactly been managing the best. Maybe it would have helped me to cope, but would that have been fair to a child?”

  He answered slowly, but she couldn’t tell if he was choosing his words with care or simply finding it difficult to follow that spate of nearly contradictory feelings.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally.

  “Neither do I, really. But sometimes I understand why people freeze eggs and sperm. Other times...” She shook her head. “Other times it’s not an issue. It just bubbles up every now and then.”

  He nodded but didn’t respond.

  She sat there for a while, nibbling on her chicken, giving him space to eat, thinking about her reaction as opposed to his. Very different responses to what was, for her, a purely emotional question. She was still wondering why she had brought it up. Except...except... A thought struck her and she spoke it before she thought it through.

  “Maybe I feel like a failure for not doing that one thing for Chet.”

  He stopped eating, his green eyes fixing on her. “Not doing...oh.” He found his way back to the earlier conversation. “Chet didn’t feel like you failed him in any way. I’m pretty damn sure of that. We spent a lot of years together in some tough places. We talked. He never had a complaint about you. Not even a little one.”

  That lightened her heart more than a little bit.

  “I’m sorry,” he volunteered, “that you didn’t have more time together.”

  She drew a deep breath, not quite a sigh. “I’ve been getting used to it, Liam. Getting used to the fact that life doesn’t make any promises to anyone. We all take the same chances. That was maybe the hardest part at first, feeling it wasn’t fair. Life just isn’t fair.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  He probably knew that as well as anyone. She resisted reaching out to him across the table. “Well,” she said brightly, “time to think about goats.”

  His brow lifted. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  One corner of his mouth crooked upward. “Chet had me working with goats in Afghanistan a few times.”

  “Then you can help me.”

  For an instant, something like distress passed over his face. “I can remember,” he reminded her, “but maybe not in a way that’s useful.”

  “You remembered how to paint. Anyway, we’ll learn together.”

  “I guess you’re determined.”

  “I need to reclaim some part of myself.” She needed to get on with her life. She’d been thinking that right before Liam arrived and for some reason, it seemed more important now. Something inside her was trying to break free and breathe again. Maybe this was the wrong way to go about it, but she needed to start somewhere.

  “I guess I’ll look at that pen out near the barn and make sure it’ll hold up,” she announced. “I need to know that before I do anything else.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to help.”

  After they washed up the dishes, they went out into the long evening to take a look at the pen. As they approached the barn, Sharon noticed the smell of the fresh primer and commented on it. “That’s a good smell after all this time. Usually when I come out this way, all I smell is musty wood.”

  “It smells pretty musty inside, too. Maybe I should clean it out.”

  “One thing at a time.” She was feeling cheerful all of a sudden. The idea of having some goats to look after and enjoy really appealed to her. She ought to get a dog, too, now that she thought about it. Time to reconnect with life.

  The evening had reached that wonderful point when the air had calmed, the light had dimmed and taken away the harshness, and the temperature had started to fall.

  “It’s beautiful tonight,” she said in a burst of exuberance.

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him and caught him smiling at her. The expression, so unguarded, was contagious and she grinned back. “I’m glad,” she admitted, “to be alive.”

  His smile faded a bit and she could only imagine what he must be thinking or remembering. Maybe she had been thoughtless in her remark?

  But then he surprised her. “So am I.” He sounded as if he meant it.

  Well, good. “Anyway, it’s about time I started looking forward again. There’s too many years left to waste.”

  “Or maybe there’s no years at all.”

  His words caught her between one breath and the next and she missed a step. God, he was so blunt sometimes, but he was also right. Nobody was guaranteed to be around tomorrow. And that trite truism struck her as incredibly profound all of a sudden.

  “Live in the moment?” she asked.

  “I seem to remember learning how to do that a long time ago. And lately that’s pretty much all I seem to be able to do.”

  “Maybe that’s smart in the long run.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes it’s necessary.”

  “True. But I think I’ve been missing too many moments by living in the past and fearing the future.”

  “I can understand that.”

  She supposed he could. They reached the pen that Chet had put u
p during his last leave: metal poles and chain link. “Chet built this,” she said. “He said it was for animals to be determined later. I think goats would be nice.”

  “Why goats?”

  She looked at him. “Because I like them. They’re smart, cute and much more impish than sheep.”

  “You want impish?”

  “It’ll be entertaining. What do you remember about the goats you’d worked with?”

  “That you had to be a damn good goatherd with a damn good dog or two. They seemed to have a lot of curiosity in them.”

  “That was my impression. I suppose I could ask Ransom, though.”

  “He raises them, too?”

  “Mostly it’s sheep but he has some goats that he claims are more like pets. Maybe that’s what I’ve been thinking about, the way he talks about them.”

  “Good to go to the expert.” He looked out over the large penned area. “There’s a lot of bushy stuff in there.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Not for goats.”

  She almost laughed. Evidently, he remembered something about the care and feeding of them. “Well, the pen looks like it’s held up, anyway. I don’t need to do anything immediately.”

  She started to walk around the large enclosure. “I guess I have a lot to learn before I go ahead with this.” She pushed on posts to make sure they were still firmly planted, and scanned the chain link for any breaks.

  He didn’t say anything as he walked with her but she found some comfort in his silent company. She’d been alone for so damn long, she realized. Even her time with Chet had been rare, and while she’d filled her days with other things, the loneliness had remained.

  “Did you know you can feel lonely even when you’re busy and have a lot of friends simply because someone you love is gone?”

  “I don’t have much experience. Never had time for anything that wasn’t casual.”

  “Well, you can. I spent a lot of time being lonely when I was married. I accepted it, but I never got used to it.”

  “I’m sorry. Chet missed you all the time, too.”

  “He told me. I sometimes wonder about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we actually spent so little time together overall. His absence was far more usual than his presence. You’d think you’d get used to it just because it was normal. Maybe it’s just me.”