“I’m tired of it, Granddad.”
“December isn’t too far away, Jenny girl.” Her grandfather stopped at the gate of the town and looked around him, as if trying to take in every inch of the rebuilt town. “I never expected to see Winter Creek as it used to be. You’re a miracle worker. It’s just the way I pictured it would look when I first envisioned it fifteen years ago. You remember, don’t you?”
She smiled, grabbing his hand to lead him back to her saloon. “I remember you talking a lot about this place. That’s how I got interested in it. I remembered when I was sixteen, after Mom and Dad told us they were getting a divorce, you brought me and Kimberley up here for the last time.”
“You were upset because your sister was with us.”
Jen’s smile softened. “It was supposed to be my time alone with you. When Kimberley was around I felt invisible.”
He reached out his hand to stop her forward momentum, stopping her in front of the old general store halfway to the saloon. “You were never invisible to me, Jenny girl.”
“I know, Granddad.”
“Good,” he said. “I just thought I’d clarify that in case you’d forgotten.”
Pounding hooves beat against the dust of the seasonally dry street, blowing up a thin layer of soil around their heads. Jen coughed and waved her hands in front of her face while turning toward the offending riders.
It was Adam, riding along side his larger brother.
“Aren’t those the two boys who’d caught your attention, Jenny girl?”
Her grandfather’s words didn’t make any sense to her. “What two boys, Granddad?”
“The two boys you told me about yesterday.” He turned with a bright smile lighting his face, his eyes looking far away. Into the past, Jen thought. “You told Kimberley and me about them last night while we set up the campfire outside of town.”
“Granddad?”
“Hey, beautiful,” Adam said lightly, jumping down from Dark Day.
His brother stayed astride his lighter horse, looking past her to the old schoolhouse on the opposite side of the town. “I’ll see you in a bit, Adam.”
“Sure thing.”
A new cloud of dust blew into her face as the rider raced toward the school.
“Sorry about mussing up your hair with all this dust,” Adam said. “I saw you standing here, so I wanted to tell you we’ll be moving the rest of the cows to the holding pens up in the summer pasture today.”
“You have cows?” Her grandfather sounded vague, still seeming to be looking at a place Jen couldn’t quite see. “You didn’t have any cows when you stayed in this old town the last time. But you and the other boy had a few young girls with you.”
“Sir.” Adam glanced over at Jen in confusion before looking toward her grandfather. “We have a herd of cows up in the hills a few miles beyond the town.”
“Granddad, don’t you remember me telling you about adding a trail drive to the agenda of the town’s special programs?” Sadness echoed in her voice, as she felt the emptiness forming high in his mind. The place she’d always sensed clear visions and answers to complicated problems whenever she’d focused her mind on his seemed oddly sapped. Is this how it was going to be for her? Is this how the onset of Alzheimer’s would look to her psyche? “Granddad, his name is Adam Craine and the other is his brother, Mark. Remember, only a few minutes ago, I told you about their cattle.”
“Of course I remember, Jenny girl.” The vagueness was gone, but the sadness still lingered in his eyes. “Now, I remember you telling me about some family named Craine deciding to sponsor the stagecoach company.”
Relief sang through her.
Adam said, “My father and mother will be taking care of the stagecoach stuff.”
“I’m glad they decided to help out,” her grandfather said. “Winter Creek needs a stagecoach station. Having the guests ride into town in a stagecoach will make the Living History Experience seem more real to them.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Jen said, touching her grandfather’s arm lightly. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.” He patted her hand briefly, with a soft sigh, before he grabbed it and placed it on Adam’s lower arm. “Why don’t you talk to your friend here? I’d like to see on my own what else the foundation has done to the town.”
“Are you sure, Granddad?”
“I’ll be all right.”
Jen fought tears as she watched him walk away, feeling him slip from her more than just in a physically distancing way. Maybe her dad and brother were right after all. Maybe she needed to go tour the assisted living place like her grandfather had asked her to do.
No, she thought, not yet.
“Jen, are you okay?” A gentle touch, gliding fingers soft against the curve of her chin, forced her gaze from the retreating man’s suddenly weak figure.
“Yes.”
“Oh, honey.” Adam’s thumb caressed along the edge of her cheek and chin. “I’m sorry.”
Shaking his touch away, she jerked around to face him. “You’re sorry for what? Granddad just gets a little confused once in a while.”
He didn’t say a word.
“I think he remembers seeing your brother and you here years back.” She looked toward the older man for a moment before looking back at Adam. “I was sixteen when I came to this town with my grandfather the last time. It was the year my mother and father finally got a divorce, and everything changed. Kimberley was with us that year.”
“You used to come up here?”
“Once a year,” she said. “My grandfather took each of us camping for a week. My brother would come up in June, me in July, and my sister in August. I loved it here.”
“I remember seeing a pretty blonde-headed girl up here a few times during the summer,” he teased, twisting loose strands of her soft brown hair around his fingers. “Was that pretty thing you?”
“No, that was my perfect little sister.” Bitterness sounded in her voice, and for once she didn’t try to hide it. “I was the dark-headed girl who always had her face stuck in a book.”
“I don’t remember a dark-headed girl.”
“No one ever does.”
He stared at her for so long she had to look down at her boots. Usually Jen made other people uncomfortable with her intently held gaze.
She added, “During my last summer here I remember a big guy with bright red hair and a thin, blonde-headed guy arriving in a cloud of dust one afternoon, sporting some large horses and giggling girls.”
He laughed. “Mark colored his hair red that year. You could see him coming a mile away.”
“My ex loved that look on me, little brother.”
Jen jerked at his approach.
“Sorry, Professor.” His lopsided grin brightened his face. “I didn’t mean to startle you. For as big as I am I should be louder. That’s what everyone tells me anyway.”
“That’s all right,” she said, pulling in a long, deep breath. “I’m upset about my grandfather.”
“Is he sick, ma’am?”
Her eyes traced over the steps her beloved grandfather had made on his way to the saloon, spying him laughing with Barb at the dressmaker’s shop on the opposite side of the street now. He looked back to normal, but Jen knew deep in her heart that things would get worse.
“Ma’am?”
“Mark,” Adam silenced his brother’s question by asking another one, “have you seen Wyatt today? The museum director wanted to talk to him about viewing the original stagecoach at the station.”
Jen glanced at Adam. “We had the coach here, in town last week.”
“That’s was only a well-made replica, Jen.”
“It was?” Surprise sounded clear in her voice, even to her own ears. “I thought the one they let us borrow was an original from the 1800s. I told everyone who wanted to know it was authentic. Reynolds told me it was an original.”
“Who is Reynolds?”
“He’s the dean at the co
llege,” she said. “The college owns this town.”
“Your dean was mistaken.” Adam stepped closer to her, studying her face with an intensity she could almost feel. “Maybe you should find out what else he wasn’t on the up-and-up with you about, Jen.”
He touched her cheek again, caressing the edge of his thumb across her skin. She placed her hand over his and looked up at him, falling into the expanse of his warm eyes.
“Well, well,” a sharp voice said behind her. “It seems you just can’t help yourself, can you?”
She looked up and saw David and the dean. Jen didn’t need this now. She didn’t need to contend with an old lover while a potential new one looked on. She wanted to walk away from David, but knew she couldn’t.
Her grandfather had taught her better manners than that.
“Don’t have anything to say to me, baby?”
Jen sensed Adam stiffening near her, sensed his temper rising high in him.
Sometimes it was good to be psychic, she thought.
“My baby has nothing to say to you.” Adam wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her tight to his side. “My baby is giving her grandfather a tour of the town.”
The look on David’s face would have been sweet if it was the end of December instead of the last week of October. “Adam, it’s okay. This is David, an old friend of mine.”
“I’m just an old friend, Jen?” David said. “I think you and I were a bit more than just friends. We were set to get married until you changed your mind.”
Adam stood up straighter.
“We were not getting married, David,” she said, pointing her finger into his thin chest. “You asked me, but I said no. I had no intention of marrying you.”
“Now, Jen,” Dean Reynolds’s voice broke through the stalemate. “There’s no need to get all upset. David just…misread your interest.”
“I didn’t misread anything.”
“Jen, let’s go and find your grandfather.” Adam squeezed her tighter to him. “He went to your saloon.”
“It’s a good thing we didn’t get married, baby.” David always had to have the last word. “No wife of mine will be running a saloon in an old western town like this.”
“I think it’s the most interesting thing about her.” Adam glanced down at her and smiled. “And so does her Aunt Grace and my grandfather Adam.”
Jen swallowed a long deep breath at the implication of his statement.
Yes, she thought, Grandpa Adam and Grace did indeed like that about her.
“I didn’t realize you had an aunt named Grace,” David said. “You never mentioned her to me.”
“She’s dead.”
Adam grinned at her comment.
“Professor Ferguson,” the pompous dean said. “I told you I didn’t like you referring to this town in that way.”
“I didn’t say anything about Winter Creek.”
“Not in so many words, no, but saying your aunt is dead implies ghostly doings.”
“It does?”
David pulled his heated gaze off her long enough to look at the dean. “What is all this talk about ghosts, George? Are you truly saying you think Winter Creek is haunted?”
“Jen believes the place is inhabited by the spirits of the dead.”
David rubbed the sharp edge of his cheek. “That’s intriguing. I’ve heard rumors of this sort from some of the student workers. I thought it was only the result of a group of young kids’ overactive imaginations.”
“Our workers have been talking about Winter Creek at the school?” Jen hadn’t heard any comments, good or bad, scary or silly, from her students. “I didn’t know they’d been experiencing strange things here too.”
“It’s only their imagination, Professor,” the dean insisted. “It’s what happens to a group of inventive youths who get together and start talking about the supernatural. It’s all in their minds.”
“Grandpa and Grace are real, believe me.” Adam’s fingers spread wide against the small of Jen’s back, trailing up to settle on the back of her neck. “Jen and I have experienced them.”
David’s look focused on Adam’s large hand, a burning hot stare of intense jealousy.
She almost stepped out of Adam’s reach because of it.
Jen didn’t need this new complication now, but she was pleased to be the focus of it.
Two men fighting over fat, old Jennifer Ferguson. Her mother and sister would be proud.
At the thought of her sister, a rush of pain filtered throughout her being. If she got any closer to Adam, Kimberley would be back in her life to mess with her head.
“Oh, there’s my granddad,” she said quickly, as she pulled away from Adam’s sweet touch. “I think I’d better go over and finish the tour I’d planned for him.”
Adam released her but not without a final caress over the shell of her earlobe.
“When you get done showing your grandfather around,” Adam said softly, “Mark and I will be at the stagecoach station with our dad. Maybe the two of you would like to see what my parents have done with the place.”
“Thanks for including me, brother,” Mark said, antsy horse side-stepping away from Adam. “I was beginning to feel invisible.”
Jen looked at Mark and smiled. “I’d like to see the station.”
Adam’s fingers moved to touch her cheek, then froze in the air for a moment as if deciding if it would be all right to proceed, before falling to her tingling skin. She tilted her head into his soft touch, and sighed.
“The semester isn’t over, baby,” David said.
Adam’s lips touched hers gently at the other man’s softly implied threat.
Jen couldn’t help it. She reached up and encircled his head with her hand, opening her lips slightly as the pressure of his mouth razed her. She didn’t want to help it. She wanted to grind her abdomen into his hardening front, and grab onto what he seemed to want to give her.
“I knew I would win the bet we had, George,” David said.
His cutting comment pushed into her developing desire, freezing her tight to the man. So they had a bet going between them, did they?
“She can’t even manage to keep it pure in the middle of Winter Creek, in front her loving grandfather.”
Oh, what was she doing?
Jen dropped her hands from Adam’s head, settling them softly on his broad shoulders. His gaze burned hot on her, teasing her a moment later as a knowing look brightened in them. She didn’t need to be psychic to read these eyes.
“You’re bad, lady,” Adam said.
“I never claimed to be anything else, cowboy.”
He angled his hat low on his head.
Jen couldn’t read him now.
“Some people never change,” David said with biting sarcasm. “I was a fool to think a woman I’d met in a bar would be a good wife for me.”
“Yes.” Jen twirled around to face him. “You were a fool, David. All I’ve ever wanted from a guy for the last six years has been mind-numbing sex. That’s all I wanted from you, and it’s all I want from Adam.”
Adam froze solid behind her before stepping away. “Jen?”
“I can’t believe I actually fell for her,” David said to no one in particular. “I can’t believe I wanted my parents to meet her.”
A chilling wind hit her back and she turned. Mark sat atop his powerful horse, staring at the retreating back of his brother. Adam’s docile black horse stepped lively behind him. “Adam, where are you going?” she called out.
He didn’t seem to hear her question. “We need to get to the stagecoach station, Mark. I’m sure Wyatt is waiting for us there.”
“Well, okay.” Mark nodded at her before spurring his horse and following his brother.
“Adam?”
He didn’t turn around to look at her. As she watched him leave, an eerie feeling flowed into her. What had she done now?
Jen wanted to call him back.
But she didn’t.
“What
a foolish bastard I was.” David seemed unaware of the strange feelings roaring in her system. “To think a woman like you would be accepted by my family.”
Her laughter sounded wrong even to her own ears. “You were a fool if you thought I was even remotely interested in giving up my freedom for you.”
“Professor Ferguson,” the dean said. “I don’t—”
“And yet—” She pulled her gaze away from the cowboy’s retreating back. “You still mention wanting to marry me at every opportunity, David.”
Dean Reynolds stood taller, stiff and straight in front of her. “I don’t think the middle of this town is the appropriate place to have this discussion.”
“Maybe we should have it in the middle of the Commons on campus instead,” she said with feeling. “Like you usually do.” Pissed at her reaction, she added, “And, after all, I am the owner of one of the finer drinking establishments in Winter Creek. I am—”
“A bitching slut,” David finished for her on a gasping breath. “You’re the perfect person to run a saloon in a 1800s town. With a past like yours, you shouldn’t have any problems satisfying your…cowboys.”
Even from a bastard like this man, the barb cut deep.
Chapter 11
The second Adam walked into the old barn, he fisted his hand and hit the juried rigged post shoring up the sidewall. It splintered in half, and the next thing he knew his brother’s fist was flying into him. The force of Mark’s punch knocked him into a pile of lumber sitting in the center of the dim building. He righted himself and swerved to face his angry brother.
“Why did you—”
“What in the hell is wrong with you, Adam?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me, Mark.” He stepped toward him. ”What’s wrong with you?”
“Like hell there isn’t anything wrong with you.”
Adam turned just in time to duck away from another punishing blow against his chest from his bigger brother. He could still feel his first punch. Something was pissing Mark off, something more than Adam punching the post, but at the moment he didn’t care enough to ask him about it.
Adam had his own problems.
“I told you before to stay away from the bracing post,” Mark said. “Dad and I don’t feel like replacing it right now.”
Forgotten Memories Page 12