Strawberry Hill

by Catherine Anderson

  “You found my thinking place.”

  The sound of Slade’s voice coming from the darkness made her jump with such a start that her rump parted company with the log. “Damn it, Slade. You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that. Why not act like a normal person and use a flashlight?”

  “Don’t need one. I could find my way down here blindfolded. It’s my special place. Trust you to find it and take up squatting rights. First you tried to steal my dog and then my bear. Now you’ve taken over my private spot.”

  Vickie sighed. “I can see why it’s special to you. The sound of the little waterfall adds the perfect touch. It’s so beautiful and peaceful among these trees, the vastness of the wilderness all around me. Being here makes me realize how insignificant I really am.”

  He said nothing for a moment while he sat down beside her. “You stole the words right out of my mouth.” He echoed her weary sigh. “That’s why I fell in love with you, you know. Because you’ve always understood me better than anyone else.”

  “Huh. All these years, and I always thought it was because I was such a damned good lay.”

  He chuckled. “That, too. The best of the best, Vickie mine. I’ve never felt the same way about any other woman.”

  A slab of bark was poking her in the buttock and she shifted to get a more comfortable seat. “So is this how our talk will go?” In Vickie’s estimation, their feelings for each other and the quality of their long-ago lovemaking were low on the list of importance when their son was in such desperate circumstances. Nancy had driven out to check on Brody, and she’d found him in bed, but she didn’t rule out the possibility that he’d disobeyed doctor’s orders. “I’m postmenopausal. I doubt I’d even like sex now. It’s no longer important to me, that’s for sure. It’s been so many years that I’m not even sure I can remember how it all goes.”

  He laughed. “Yeah? Well, anytime you want a refresher course, you just let me know.” He straightened his legs and crossed his ankles. “But we can drop that topic for now. I know we have a lot to hash out, but if my son is in a jam, he should be our first priority.”

  Resentment welled within Vickie when he referred to Brody as his son. He’d never done one thing to deserve the title except to donate his sperm. “Yes,” she said tightly. “He’s injured and in a financial jam. The doctor has ordered bed rest for a week, just for starters. No indication of how long it will be before he can work, and if he doesn’t work, he’ll lose everything.”

  “He got a family?”

  “Yes, a sick wife and three sons. His wife has rheumatoid arthritis. That’s the crippling kind, in case you don’t know. She’s a registered nurse, earned a good income until it struck, and now she can’t work. Brody has nearly gone broke trying to take care of her. His son Marcus is brilliant. He earned a scholarship to attend Oregon State, but his dream university was Harvard. Nobody but me believed he’d get accepted there, but he did. I ended up getting an equity loan against my house to help him follow that dream, which is why I decided to get a job as a camp cook with an outfitter. I can’t pay my mortgage by working in the depressed economy along the coast right now. I could lose my place. You know the rest of that story.”

  “Kind of, sort of. But what didn’t make sense to me the first day is making more sense now. I didn’t know about Brody then. I had no idea.” He clamped a big hand over her knee. “And don’t go getting all pissed at me for saying that. I truly never got your letters. The night you broke our engagement, I begged you to trust in my word, and you couldn’t. I’m asking you to do that again, Vick. From where you’re standing, I know it appears that I’m lying. But I swear to you I’m not. I never got them.”

  “All right. Fine. Somehow four letters went astray in the mail. That makes perfect sense.”

  “I know it doesn’t make sense. But will you look at me?”

  Vickie couldn’t. When she did and he stuck to his same old lies, she got an unholy urge to slap his mouth. “I’m not going there, Slade. You say you never got the letters. The pity of it is, that story doesn’t hold water. You’re asking me to believe in the incredible. I quit believing in fairy tales a very long time ago.”

  “Please, just look at me, Vickie. Straight into my eyes as I repeat it one more time.”

  “You’re impossible. I looked into your eyes when you lied to me once. I prefer not to do it again. So, here’s the deal.” She finally forced herself to meet his gaze. “If you’ll step up to the plate now and acknowledge your son, I’ll pretend from this moment on that I believe you. If that’s what it takes for us to move forward from here and help Brody, it’ll be a small price for me to pay. You did a good job of breaking my heart the first time. You shattered it into a thousand pieces, and I could never glue it back together again. You can’t break things twice. You can only grind the fragments to dust under the heels of your boots. I’ll ask you to resist that urge. I’ve learned to cope. I moved forward. At least leave me with the fragments so that when I leave here, I’ll still have what I came here with.”

  “The last thing I’ve ever wanted to do is hurt you, Vickie. I loved my dad. I loved my mom. I even love my sister, even though she’s a bitter pill to swallow sometimes. But you’re the only person I’ve ever loved more than I love myself.”

  “Oh, Slade.” Vickie wanted to tell him that she wished she could believe that, but she knew that would be the wrong thing to say. “Thank you for that.”

  He grunted. It was sort of a huff under his breath, and he’d been doing it a lot lately. He gazed off into the moon-silvered darkness for a while. She suspected that he knew she hadn’t bought into his profession of love for her. But there was very little she could do to change the truth.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “Brody. Let’s stick to that. How much money do you think he needs right now to keep him afloat? I’ll send him a check.”

  Vickie’s heart caught, because that couldn’t happen, not yet, and she knew when she told Slade, he’d be as angry with her as he’d been the night before. It was going to get ugly. But she saw no way to avoid it. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to make the check out to me, Slade. I’ll have to send Brody the money.”

  “Why?” he asked. “Does he think my money is tainted or something?”

  “No.” The words she needed to say clogged in her throat. She had to knot her hands into tight fists and force herself to speak. “I haven’t told Brody you’re his father yet. He doesn’t even know you exist.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Slade could scarcely believe his ears—he stared at Vickie for at least five full seconds, trying to make sense of the words she’d just uttered. What the hell? If the man had three kids, he sure as hell knew how babies were made, namely, that it took two people to get the job done, one of them a woman and one of them a man. He shot to his feet.

  “How can that be possible?” He knew his voice had gone up in volume, but he couldn’t for the life of him speak calmly. “What does the boy think, that you found him in your garden under a cabbage leaf?”

  Even in the faint moonlight, Slade saw Vickie’s face drain of color. She looked up at him with those big green eyes, only right then they didn’t look green, but shimmery like the silver light that gilded the forest around them.

  “Please, Slade, don’t yell at me, not over this. I think I was a pretty good mom in most ways, but this one thing—well, it’s haunted me for years. I made a bad decision. I understand how wrong it was. I lied to my children about it for years and only told my daughter, Nancy, the truth right before I left to come here.”

  Slade took three paces away from her, then turned and walked back. Self-control. He’d prided himself for years on his ability to hold his temper, and he could surely do that now. He made himself sit back down on the log. “Okay,” he pushed out. “For you, Vick, I’m going to stay calm and not yell.”

  “Do you promise? Because I�
��m not entirely sure my nerves can take this conversation.”

  “I promise!” It irked him beyond measure that she might cling to a promise he made to her, but she couldn’t trust in his word. “Just spit it out.”

  She nodded. In the shadows he saw her dainty larynx bob up and down. She was digging her nails into her knees, and watching her do that almost made him wince. Even through denim, she would gouge her skin if she bore down any harder.

  “For God’s sake, nothing can be that bad. Just tell me. Then we’ll talk it over. It’ll be okay, and I promise I won’t yell.”

  She nodded. Then she closed her eyes, her lashes casting fringed shadows onto her pale cheeks. “I, um—I let Brody believe Matt Brown is his real dad.”

  As the words hit the air, they didn’t sound so bad. Slade was halfway through nodding his head when their meaning sank into his brain. “You what?”

  She leaned toward him. “Please try to understand. I had sound reasons, Slade. Matt said he would love Brody as if he were his own. He said if we told Brody that he wasn’t Matt’s, he would always feel like the odd child out when we had more kids.”

  Slade bit down so hard on his back teeth that he was afraid he had cracked a molar. “Let me get this straight,” he said in what he felt was a normal voice. “You allowed a violent, drunk, woman-beating son of a bitch to decide if my son should be told who his real father is? And now, as Brody approaches middle age, he still believes another man’s blood flows in his veins?”

  “Slade, you’re starting to raise your voice.”

  “I am not raising my voice, and even if I was, raising my voice is not yelling. When I yell, the veins pop out in my neck and on my forehead! Do you see any popping out?”

  “Yes. It makes me worry you’re going to have a stroke.”

  “I am not going to have a stroke. What I’m going to have is a jug of whiskey. I’m going to take it to my new tent, build myself a fire, and pretend you didn’t tell me this while I drink the whole damned thing!”

  “That sounds like a really good plan. Maybe it will—I don’t know—give you a different perspective on things.”

  Slade got up and walked back toward camp, but with every step he kept seeing Vickie dig her nails into her knees. He finally stopped and looked back, hoping to find her following him. But in the glimmer of moonlight, he could still see the blurry shape of her sitting on the log. He slumped his shoulders, stood there for a moment, and then retraced his steps to her.

  She jumped with a start again when he circled the log. “Why are you back? Did you forget something?”

  “Yeah,” he said as he sat beside her again. “I forgot to say I’m sorry for raising my voice at you.” He took off his hat, thrust his fingers through his hair, and put it back on. “And I need to say I’m sorry for not being more understanding about what you went through.”

  She looked up at him, and in the moonlight, tears shimmered in her eyes like quicksilver. Slade had never been able to stand it when she cried. Maybe it was because she so rarely let go and wept. “Don’t cry, Vick.” He scooted closer to her and curled his arm around her shoulders. “No funny business. Just as your friend.”

  “Yeah, right,” she said in a choked voice. “If this is friendship, who needs enemies?” He heard her gulp. “I’m so sorry, Slade. I should have told Brody the truth after I divorced Matt. Well, maybe not right away. He was only five, almost six. But I should have done it as soon as he was old enough to understand and deal with it.”

  “It’s done,” he told her. “We can’t go back and rewrite the script, Vickie. Once we mess up, we can’t undo it. I wasn’t there, so I can’t say if you handled it wrong or perfectly right. You knew our son, what he could handle and what he couldn’t. I’m sure you made what you believed was the right decision at the time. None of us should expect more from ourselves than that, and we shouldn’t allow anyone else to.”

  She’d turned her face against his coat, and her voice was muffled. “The truth is, I was scared to tell him when he got older. He’s so much like you, Slade.”

  “He is?” That revelation made Slade smile. “Really. Tell me about him.”

  “Well, he looks almost exactly like you. The day I told Nancy the truth, I was going through old pictures, and I’d found one of you. It was taken near where we are now, right here on Strawberry Hill. You were standing under a ponderosa pine and wearing that red shirt I made you for your twentieth birthday.”

  “I remember that day,” he said, and his smile deepened, because his memories of that time in their lives seemed almost magical to him now. “So what possessed you to finally tell Nancy about me?”

  “She thought it was a snapshot of Brody. I won’t get into all the rest. What’s important is that she looked very closely at the photograph, marveling over how young Brody looked, and she honestly believed it was her brother until she noticed that you were wearing a championship buckle. Brody placed in a few competitions later, when he was older than you were in that picture, but he didn’t have the money for rodeo events at that age.”

  Slade tried to imagine how it might feel to meet his son and recognize familiar features on the young man’s face. “You know what, Vick? By coming here to tell me about Brody, you’ve given me something I yearned for and believed I would never have after all of these years.” He pressed a kiss to the top of her head and breathed in the scent of her hair. “For that alone, I’ll be grateful to you until the day I die. When you talk about the pregnancy—well, I wish I’d known so I could have been there.” He felt her try to pull away and tightened his hold on her. “Nope. You promised to pretend you believe me about the letters if I’ll step up to the plate. Remember? I’m doing that, so you have to keep your end of the bargain. And if you believed me, you’d want to hear this.”

  “Okay. Fine. Say what you want.”

  He bent his head sideways to rest his cheek against her hair. She hadn’t drawn it back into a band, so her curls wisped against his skin like watch springs made of silk. “At my age, a single man who never had children starts to face his own mortality. I have that ranch. It’s been in my family for generations, it brings in a damned good income, and the land alone is worth millions. Sometimes I’d be out working and sweating my ass off, and I’d look out across the green pastures and wonder how it could be that I’d have no one to leave all of it to when I died. That’s an awful feeling. It made me wonder why I kept working so hard. Why I didn’t just quit and let the forest encroach upon it, little by little.”

  “Oh, Slade.”

  “I know it sounds morose, but I’m only telling you so you can understand how learning of Brody’s existence is like a dream come true for me. You say he needs help. Well, I do, too. Do you think there’s any possibility that he might be interested in ranching?”

  She laughed softly. “Any possibility? Slade, your son isn’t only an apple that didn’t fall far from the tree. I’m not sure if he ever parted company with the branch.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means he’s like you in so many other ways that raising him brought tears to my eyes sometimes. I think horses and ranching and cows run in his blood. As a toddler, he saw a horse out the car window and fell in love. A few weeks later, he saw a magazine with horses in it. He got so excited. His first three words were mama, daddy, and horse.

  “By the time he was a teen, his love of horses had become a passion. I couldn’t afford to get him one. He wanted nothing to do with soccer or football or basketball. He wasn’t interested in playing baseball with the neighborhood kids. It was always only about horses for him. I set back as much money as I could for the kids to attend college. Nancy and Randall—Randall is my middle child—both attended college. Brody took his money to buy a horse and a dilapidated old farmhouse on ten acres. He lives there to this day.”

  Slade loved the thought that his son was a lot like him. It was a
gift that he wished had come to him sooner, but he couldn’t quibble over the time lost. Meeting his boy, getting to know him, maybe even working side by side with him on the Wilder land. That was like a miracle to Slade.

  “What’s he do for a living?”

  “He’s a horse trainer. Self-taught. There are colleges that offer that kind of coursework now, but Brody wouldn’t have gone even if it had been available. He wanted land and a horse, and he took that meager start and built a career out of it. He has an affinity with equines. Most of them take to him immediately. It’s an incredible thing to watch. When you meet him, you’ll be astounded, because he couldn’t be more like you if you’d raised him yourself.”