by Mary Brady
“The waitress assured me they would keep a couple hours, in case you weren’t home right away. Longer in the fridge, she said.”
“Let’s go, Aunt Abby,” Kyle called from the window of her SUV.
“I’ll be there in a minute, sweetie pie,” she called to the child. “And put the candy inside your backpack.”
To Reed she said, “If you bring the sandwiches, there is a picturesque place to eat them. You might as well see one of Montana’s treasures.” A beautiful treasure, a waterfall to be exact. A charming, little waterfall that always made her wistful. What the heck. She hadn’t been wistful in days, maybe weeks. And maybe if she didn’t drool on him, Reed Maxwell wouldn’t know just how wistful she could get.
“Scenery with our food sounds good.”
“There’s a cooler with a cold pack and some bottles of water in it. Stow the sandwiches and let’s go.”
Five minutes later, when they arrived at her mother’s house, Kyle freed himself from his booster seat, leaped out and raced toward his grandmother.
Delanna Fairbanks sauntered off the porch of her small yellow house and across the yard toward Abby’s SUV. Her auburn hair with a few strands of gray flowed around her thin shoulders. She wore a pink rhinestone decorated T-shirt and on her long, shapely legs denim capri pants, clothing she no doubt found in Lena’s closet.
Kyle flew into her arms and the two of them hugged and then danced around. Then hand in hand they walked to the car.
“Hi, Mom,” Abby said.
Her mother wasn’t looking at her, she was leaning in the driver’s side window to stare at Reed. She stood up where only Abby could see her face and mouthed, “Wow!”
Abby mouthed “shut up” back, but gave her a grin. Sometimes her mother was just right and there was no use debating.
Reed climbed out and walked up to Delanna.
“Hi, I’m Reed Maxwell, Jesse’s brother.” He reached out for a handshake.
“I’m Delanna Fairbanks, and whatever Abby has said about me, take it with a grain of salt.” Delanna took his hand in both of hers and squeezed as if she were welcoming him into the family.
“Can we go now, Gramma?” Kyle tugged on his grandmother’s leg until she let go of Reed’s hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Reed.”
He was grinning like a fool. Delanna did that to people. “I am pleased to meet you also, Delanna.”
“Gramma.”
Delanna took Kyle’s hand and tweaked his cheek. “Let’s go already.”
The two of them ran toward the house. Her mom turned back for a moment and gave Abby a we’ll-be-just-fine wave.
Then her mother leaned down and said something to Kyle who turned and called out. “Bye, Aunt Abby. Bye, Reed.” He waved and turned as quickly away and plowed forward into the house dragging his grandmother with him. He didn’t so much as hesitate. They would be all right.
Abby was proud of her mother. Delanna had stepped up and taken on some of the responsibility for her grandson, even before Lena left. It was almost as if having a child around made her mother finally grow up, something she hadn’t done for her own children, but for which Abby had forgiven her and Lena would someday. Yes, Kyle and his “gramma” would be just fine.
Now if “Aunt Abby” would be all right…
When she turned away from the house, Reed had gotten back in the truck and was watching her. His dark eyes did the smoke thing. His hair did that glistening thing. And now she was the fool.
She was about to embark on a trip in a small SUV, a very small SUV, or so it seemed at that moment, and across a miniscule console sat the sexiest man she’d seen in a very long time, and the trip would take at least an hour’s driving time there and another back.
And he did smell good.
She put her hands firmly on the wheel and pulled out into the street. She could do this. She could think of him in a professional manner, as if he were the relative of a patient. He was just another human being. The package he presented didn’t mean any more than if he were old Mr. Hawes who’d come into the clinic for a physical last week—she wished.
She squeezed the steering wheel until her knuckles blanched.
“Is there something wrong, Abby?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” Abby relaxed her grip on the steering wheel and let the blood flow back into her fingers. “In fact, things are peachy.”
Or they will be peachy when Reed Maxwell had packed up his bags and left for the city. She chanced a glance at him and wasn’t surprised to see his expression all but shouted his disbelief.
She gave a sharp laugh. “Fine. I’m just hoping Kyle and his grandmother don’t burn down the entire village while I’m gone. Knowing them, it would please them both to have such a large bonfire for roasting wienies. It’s kind of an immature leading the young with those two and I’m never quite sure who’s who.” Not even a lie, she thought as they passed the outskirts of the town of St. Adelbert and started upward into the mountains.
If she could just distract herself, maybe she could get through this trip. She took the clip from her hair and let the air from the open windows cool her skin.
The road rose quickly from the valley in which the town of St. Adelbert lay. The river that ran through town now tumbled over beige and gray rocks beside the road with the water reflecting the bright blue of the sky. Pine trees sandwiched the road and river for a while until the road climbed higher and then walls of rough stone rose on one or both sides of the SUV.
“Those little trickles of water coming out of the rock face—” Abby pointed out the window “—become ice cascades when the weather is cold enough.”
“It’s beautiful country.”
Abby could hear the wonder in Reed’s voice. Her own still held it, as she never got tired of the natural beauty.
“If we’re lucky, we might see some of the wild life.”
“Lions, tigers and bears?”
“No tigers, I’m afraid, but we do mountain lions and bears, black and grizzly, quite nicely.”
“Nice is not the word I might use if I encounter any of the above.”
“Encounters are probably more rare than you think.”
“They don’t want to see us any more than we want to see them. I’ve heard, but do they realize how much I really don’t want to see them?”
She laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“What are these people like who live so far out in the country they might not know Jesse is missing?”
Reed spoke so formally, so un-Jesse-like.
“Well, Herman and Emma Harvey are old and they’re razor sharp. They could probably survive anywhere, even in the city, but I still worry about them. They’re too old to be living so far out by themselves.” She smiled. “But I’m not sure anyone is even brave enough to broach the subject with them.”
“What are the chances they’ll have any information about Jesse?”
“I don’t really know. But I do need to warn you about them.”
He gave her a wary look. “Warn me?”
“These folk will either talk to you, tell you what they know, or they won’t say more than a word or two. It depends on how Jesse left things with them, and more importantly, will depend on the impression you make on them.”
She slowed to take a hairpin curve in the road as they climbed higher yet.
“Do I make a bad impression?”
She grinned. She couldn’t help it. “The town is softening toward you. At first they were suspicious of what you wanted with their Jesse.”
“Maybe I should have spread more cash around.”
She knew he was kidding. “They’d have taken it, but it wouldn’t have changed their minds. But hey, you’ve got me. The Harveys already like me. Besides, I brought them a bribe. Alice’s Huckleberry Jam made lovingly by the owner of the town’s diner.”
“Jam?”
“Not just jam. Those berries grew in the wild, and out here you risk a bear encounter when you go out i
nto the woods to pick them.”
“Huh. Sounds tasty.”
“You probably already had some. Alice sometimes uses it in the sweet rolls she makes.”
“I might have had some of the bear jam—”
“Huckleberry.”
“But I don’t have anything against a good strawberry or even apricot jam. Not many bear encounters while harvesting those fruits I’d guess.”
“You’re such a city fella.”
“I would be that.” He smiled as though he enjoyed the truth.
He lost some of his uptightness when he smiled, and the smile might have drained some of the tension from her, too. She tried to see that as a good thing.
“Anyway, I called just before we left and told them we were stopping in to see them. They said they’d be happy to share a pitcher of lemonade with us.”
“Since we’re visiting in person, I assumed they didn’t have a phone.”
“They have a phone,” she said, but didn’t look at him.
“So this could have been done over the phone?”
“If you’re trying not to sound annoyed, it’s not working very well.” She paused and when he didn’t say anything, continued, “Did I say they were old? Make that very old, like two years older than dirt. I wasn’t telling them anything like Jesse’s missing over the phone.”
“That seems reasonable. Although I’m used to having things move faster.”
“There is fast here, but it’s on a slightly different trajectory, one you might not recognize.”
He turned away to look out the window. “I didn’t mean to sound insensitive.”
She let that one go.
CHAPTER SIX
ABBY SEARCHED FOR ANOTHER topic and chose one she hoped might be more mundane. “What do you do for a living? Jesse was always sort of vague on that topic.”
“It’s a vague kind of business. My partner and I invest for businesses. Sometimes we buy other businesses, sometimes real estate. Whatever best suits a particular client’s needs.”
That information was more unsettling than she would have liked. She now knew for sure his money and influence were enough for him to get Kyle away from her while Lena was overseas. Her stomach clenched as it always did when she thought of her sister in a hostile zone. In the blink of an eye, if Kyle lost his mother, he could lose everything he ever knew: his mother, aunt, grandmother and his home. Abby prayed she would know the right thing to do if her nephew ever faced such a future.
Too complicated. Too scary to think about for very long.
In a perfect world, she’d just ask Reed what he thought about the possibility of Kyle being Jesse’s and what they should do about it. In a dream world, he’d tell her it would be great to have a nephew and that the boy could come for a visit when he was older, about eighteen—and a half. In the meantime, he’d busy himself setting up a college fund.
That could be just what would happen. Maybe Reed Maxwell was a good man, a fine man. He could also want to take Kyle away. Did that make him bad? If it harmed Kyle, it might.
Heaven help her, she needed to make her mind go someplace else.
Think of him as a nice man. He hasn’t done anything that should make her think anything less of him. And he did look nice with the dark knit of his shirt stretched across muscles that nearly begged to be touched. His face cleanly shaven did the same for kisses.
She couldn’t let herself go there, either.
She concentrated on the whine of the SUV’s tires on the roadway, the tuneless hum of the wind rushing in the window. And then on the heat she imagined radiating from the man beside her.
The scenery. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and concentrated on the scenery. She loved the land of crags and scrub-covered hills with the soaring peaks visible between stands of tall pines.
She was about to round a curve that would showcase snowcapped peaks. When she did she watched Reed. His lips parted in awe and she smiled. He did appreciate some of the same things she did about the valley.
St. Adelbert had adopted her, twice, once as a young preteen along with her mother and sister, and not long ago when she needed a place to come home to. By the time she returned a second time, life had betrayed her and she was so fragile she had almost cracked, but the valley welcomed her as if she were whole and a good addition to the family of folk.
Thinking of her life in Denver reminded her of her friend Carrie, the creepface. It usually took the two of them at least a half-dozen messages between them before they finally got to talk. The first one in the chain of messages got to think up their nicknames for the chain. Creepface was on its fifth or sixth link in the current chain.
“I never imagined there was so much wilderness out here.”
Reed’s voice split the silence, and Abby gave a startled laugh.
“I don’t know if the folks round here would much appreciate you callin’ their spreads ‘wilderness,’” she said, affecting her best cowpoke drawl. “We are just passing the Whispering Winds, where the doctors from the town’s clinic live.”
She pointed out the window on his side of the SUV and then to the land ahead of the truck. “And up ahead is the Shadow Range where the Doyle family lives. Mother, father, three sons and two of their wives.”
“I met Baylor Doyle at the diner.”
“He’s the youngest unmarried son.” She continued pointing as she spoke.
“Don’t tell me he’s the smallest.”
“Ha ha. Anyway, that’s where we’re stopping on the way back to check up on Evvy.” She pointed again. “And over that ridge is the Lazy D—”
He covered her hand with his and lowered her finger. “I get it. Nice—uh—farmland?”
She pulled her hand away. “Wilderness might be a better call on your part.”
“Ranches,” he offered instead.
She nodded. Though what she wanted to do was to rub away the feeling of his touch from the back of her hand. She’d missed the intimate touch of a man. Not that Reed’s touch had been intimate, not really, not on his part, but to her it had been a caress.
“Yeah, ranches.”
They rode in another long silence, until they came upon a familiar landmark.
“Frogs.” It was his turn to point out the window as they approached the rock formation that looked like a couple of pond creatures hunkered down and ready to leap. “Somehow, I didn’t expect them to be so—”
“Green?” She curled her lips in. “They used to be greener. Nature is helping by fading them. No one could ever prove it, but we always believed the Farmington brothers painted them a hideous bottle-green when they were teenagers.”
Reed laughed. A nice sound. A sound that tickled her pulse, she admitted.
“I think they’d look more froglike,” he said speculatively, “with a few spots, maybe they’d even look artsy.”
“I’m afraid the Farmington brothers were more into mischief than realism or art.”
Shortly after the frog rock formation, she turned the SUV down a narrower road. “It’s rougher from now on. Be prepared for bouncing around a bit.”
“I think I can handle it.”
They had been gaining altitude for a while and now they dropped slowly down into another valley and the new silence between the two of them made her weary. He was Jesse’s brother, she could be friendly to him. Maybe if she was, he’d think better of her and the valley his brother had chosen to call home for a short while. Maybe he’d even walk away without prying too deeply.
“What was Jesse like as a kid?” A reasonably neutral territory she hoped, as long as the subject of Kyle didn’t come in tandem with Jesse. That was a place Abby didn’t want to go—especially since she had nowhere to go with it. Lena, when you get home…
“He might still be one,” Reed answered, interrupting her Lena rant before she got it going well.
“A kid?”
“He never seemed to like playing the part of the grown-up.”
“Yeah.” Abby c
oncurred. “His favorite place in Denver was the zoo, especially the lorikeet enclosure.
He might still be feeding them as we speak if Lena and I hadn’t dragged him out of the aviary. He had a T-shirt dyed lorikeet colors.”
“Lorikeets are birds.”
“Very brightly colored little birds. Popular in zoos because they will tamely eat nectar from a cup you hold for them.”
Reed kept his gaze turned to the scenery. “Jesse used to climb trees to look in bird’s nests. One day he brought a newly hatched robin in the house. He’d found it on the ground.”
“Tough one. What happened to the bird?”
“As far as Jesse knew, it went to the local Audubon society to be raised and flew off to a long and satisfying bird life.”
Abby wanted to backpedal and take back the conversation. She didn’t want to see Reed Maxwell and his family as kind, thoughtful enough to spare a young Jesse’s feelings. Never mind, she wanted to say, but instead said, “That was a nice thing to do for a kid.”
“One of the nannies knew her life would be easier if Jesse didn’t know.”
“One of the nannies?”
“That’s how Jesse and I were raised, mostly.”
“Oh.” Wow. She didn’t know what to say to that, but apparently she didn’t have to worry about feeling too guilty about not wanting to get to know the Maxwell family too well. If Kyle was Jesse’s, the Maxwells might take him away only to be cared for by the hired help.
She couldn’t let that happen to her sister’s child.
“We weren’t exactly dream children and Mother, well…” Reed continued.
Mothers might be a better conversation topic. “‘Mother, well…’ I know that one. There are a lot of ‘wells’ attached to my mother.”
“For instance?”
She glanced over at him. He now sat turned toward her, the expression on his face inquisitive—on his handsome face, she corrected, a face she’d like to reach out and touch. She turned to concentrate on the rare straight stretch of road. “It’s not a very interesting story. Trust me.”