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Fearing she might choke on them, Melodie chose her words carefully. “It’s not that. It’s just that she deserved better.”
“Yes, she did,” Buck agreed, biting back the oath scalding his tongue. “She deserved a whole lot better than what you gave her, and I’m not talking about a blasted set of dishes either!”
That cruel accusation caused Melodie to spin around on her heels. Eyes the color of a stinging winter sky snapped with indignation.
“And just what gives you the right to judge me? To sit as both judge and jury on my feelings for my mother?” she demanded.
Matching hers in intensity, Buck’s eyes threatened to burn a hole right through her.
“Years of being by her side, watching her scrimp and save to leave you a ‘respectable’ inheritance, months of holding her hand and watching her waste away from cancer and heartache as she waited for any scrap of attention you might deem to send long-distance.”
“Self-righteous words from the dutiful son my mother never had. Between her sainthood and your martyrdom, I doubt if there would have been enough room at her bedside for a sinner like me!” Melodie snarled in return.
Despite the vehemence of her response, Melodie’s shoulders slumped beneath the weight of her guilt. Sucker punched by Buck’s resentment, she turned aside to hide the depth of her pain. Placing both hands on the dated Formica countertop, she attempted to steady herself. Her hands were still trembling when she reached for the coffeepot and poured herself a cup. As if hoping to somehow warm herself all the way through with its meager heat, she wrapped her fingers tightly around it before turning back around to face her grand inquisitor.
What possible good would come from trying to explain that Randall wouldn’t let her come home? That juggling a demanding job and a manic-depressive husband simultaneously was all she had been able to manage at the time. The excuse sounded pathetic even to her own ears. Squaring her slender shoulders, Melodie strode back to the table with her chin tilted defiantly up. Taking her seat, she brought the cup to her lips to blow away the steam that rose like an incantation from the dark brew.
The silence was deafening. They looked at one another more as strangers separated by strands of barbed wire than as one-time soul mates. Swishing a sip of hot liquid around in her mouth, Melodie forced herself to swallow it along with yet another tough piece of leftover pride.
“Look, Buck,” she began, daring to meet his eyes dead on. “You’re certainly entitled to your feelings, and God knows I owe you a debt of gratitude not to mention a long overdue apology. But it’s unlikely that the years of hurt between us are going to be healed over any cup of coffee. Since we’ve both got a couple of hard days ahead of us, do you think we could postpone our mutual animosity until after the funeral?”
For the first time since she had stepped inside the house, his features visibly softened.
Taking in the hard line of Melodie’s jaw and the way her throat pulsed as it closed around unshed tears, Buck realized just how near she was to breaking down. After years of cherishing the idea, he was surprised to discover how distasteful the actual possibility was.
Unbidden memories tugged at his conscience as he recalled the last conversation he’d had with her mother.
Don’t be too hard on my little girl when she comes home, Grace had begged him on her deathbed. She was awful young when she hurt you, and you don’t know what kind of struggles she’s had to endure these past years.
Buck didn’t dare squeeze the frail hand that clutched his. Grace’s bones were brittle, her skin almost translucent, her eyes dark hollows of concern—ever filled with concern for the daughter who had abandoned them both.
I won’t, he had replied over the bile that rose in his throat.
There was little Buck could refuse Grace. Abandoned as a child by an alcoholic single mother with the morals of an alley cat, he spent years being bounced from foster family to foster family. Grace had literally snatched him off the road to the reform school when she offered him a job.
And a home.
And an opportunity to be accepted for who he was and what he had to contribute to their family. She had treated him as if he truly were her flesh and blood. Although she pleaded with her eyes, Grace had not openly asked him to forgive her daughter. Buck was grateful for that. Some things were simply too reprehensible to warrant forgiveness, and being cheated on was one of them. He wasn’t likely to ever forget the fact that Melodie had made a fool of him. A broken heart is hard enough to heal in private, but when a proud man is made the target of public snickering, it is often easier to simply discard his heart than to attempt resuscitating something damaged beyond repair.
While Melodie waited for a response to her request for a temporary truce, she stiffened her nerves with another shot of caffeine. She could almost feel the strong, black coffee eating away the lining of her empty stomach.
“Fair enough,” Buck conceded grudgingly. “I suppose the least either of us could do for Grace is call a cease-fire for the time being.”
“Thank you,” she said, rising on shaky legs. “I guess I’d better get started unpacking.”
Buck did not respond with so much as a grunt let alone an offer to help her bring in her luggage. Facing his past had proven harder than he’d imagined. In recurring dreams, he’d told this woman exactly what he thought of her, lashing out with brutal honesty until she melted into a puddle of remorse at his feet. Oddly enough, now that the moment had come, he found he simply didn’t have the heart for it. Grace had always maintained that vengeance should be left to the Lord. Maybe she was right. Looking into Melodie’s guarded eyes, Buck saw a glimpse of someone who’d been through hell on earth. He doubted whether anything he had to say would penetrate the protective mask she was wearing. That brittle facade was so firmly fixed in place that he wondered if behind it there remained a single trace of the sweet girl with whom he had once upon a time fallen so desperately in love.
Suddenly his anger was overcome by a staggering sense of loss. What was the use of venting so many years after the fact? What could possibly be gained by inflicting even more pain upon one another now? Having embraced Grace’s faith some time ago, he recalled God’s admonition to forgive others as we would have others pardon our transgressions. Had he not been holding so tightly on to his splintered ego, Buck might have made an attempt to reach out to this shadowy vision of his past, envelop her in his arms and offer her a measure of comfort on this sad, dreary day.
Bewildered by the very idea, he abruptly announced, “I’ve got to feed the stock. Make yourself at home.”
Melodie glanced at him sharply. Was the remark intended to be as caustic as it had sounded? Surely he wasn’t worried that she was going to throw him out of the only home he’d ever known? Or herself for that matter. While it was true that she had lived in finer places since she’d moved away, none had ever earned the privilege of feeling like a real home.
“I’ll do that,” she replied evenly, starting toward her old room with the same confidence with which she had approached the cupboards earlier, certain that nothing in this old house had changed at all.
But what she discovered behind that familiar closed door was enough to send her reeling.
Chapter Two
“I suppose you expected me to stay in the bunkhouse forever?”
Melodie snapped her jaw back into place before attempting to address the question. The way Buck was leaning up against the wall prejudging her was so patently insolent that she didn’t dare give him an honest reaction. She didn’t think she could endure much more of his scoffing.
“Of course not,” she lied.
It was, after all, a perfectly logical arrangement. Melodie simply couldn’t bring herself to accept the fact that her mother had actually moved Buck into her old room. So secure had she been in the belief that this little house was impervious to change that it unnerved her to realize all vestiges of her presence had been completely erased from the room that had at one time been the center of her universe.
She had opened the door expecting to see everything in its place: her old stuffed animals, a prized collection of ceramic horses, a beloved Western doll with a leather fringed skirt and vest, her trophies lined up on the shelf along one wall, a coveted rodeo queen sash draped over the head-board of her twin bed, the embroidered quilt her mother had stitched with equal amounts of love and patience one Christmas when money was particularly scarce—all the special things that marked the passage of her youth.
Instead Melodie was met by stark walls devoid of anything more personal than a trophy fish mounted above Buck’s four-poster bed. The room was tidy enough, she’d give him that. As neat as an orphan’s scrapbook. She suspected that her mother was responsible for the only personal touch in the room: a handmade afghan folded neatly on the foot of a bed that quite simply overwhelmed the small area.
“Just tell me when you want me to move out.”
Startled by the straightforwardness of Buck’s overture, Melodie hastened to reassure him that she had no intention of uprooting him.
“N-never,” she stammered over the tripping of a heart too easily moved to sentimental palpitations. “I’ll just put my things in Mom’s room.”
Despite the glibness of her response, Buck’s occupancy in her old room did present Melodie with a new and unfathomable set of problems. She couldn’t imagine sleeping in the very next room to the man whose heart she had accidentally broken without ever fully explaining herself. A man who had every right to hate her guts. A man whose presence still had the power to make her very soul tremble.
For one thing, the walls were paper-thin! she thought to herself.
People were bound to talk, Buck thought to himself.
Indeed, gossip traveled faster than a brush fire in this small community where everything was everybody’s business. Pushing himself away from the wall, Buck came to stand within inches of Melodie. So close that he could smell her uniquely feminine scent. That haunting blend of leather and lace, sagebrush and musk, stirred memories of a time when the world was as new to them as to a colt surveying life for the first time on wobbly legs.
“Aren’t you worried about your reputation, Little Bit?” he queried, cocking an eyebrow at her.
Her reputation! Melodie almost laughed out loud. If he only knew how little that tattered rag mattered to her.
“You were always a lot more worried about that than I was.” Hearing the trace of bitterness in her voice, she hastened to add, “Besides I’m well past worrying what anyone else thinks, Buck.”
Even you, she silently added.
Once upon a time she had allowed concern for fickle virtue to throw away a life with the gentle man who refused to bed her for the manipulative opportunist who had. What she had endured throughout the travesty of her marriage left Melodie numb to the threat of public ridicule.
She risked a small smile. “What about you? Are you worried about a wicked widow besmirching your honor?”
Buck snorted his derision at the idea.
“Once you’ve been dragged through the mud down the streets of this one-horse town, you get used to it.”
Falling into his amber-colored eyes was like diving to the bottom of a glass of expensive bourbon, aged with pain. Melodie yearned to reach out and caress his rough cheek with an equally work-roughened hand, to smooth away his sorrows with a well-chosen, heartfelt apology.
I am so sorry, she longed to say, knowing she was the one responsible for his humiliation.
But sorry was such a useless word. It could neither bring back her mother, nor Randall, nor change the course of a life shaped by one horrible mistake.
Melodie opened her mouth to respond, but no words came out.
Buck left her standing there feeling rather like a guppy. The front door closed behind him with a sigh of regret. As if afraid of disturbing a single dust mote, she trod softly across what was now Buck’s room. Melodie took a deep breath before entering. Assailed by the trace fragrance of lilacs that had been Grace’s signature scent, she was instantly taken back to a vision of her mother as a young woman. Eyes the same vivid blue as her daughter’s twinkled in a face as yet unlined by time.
“Oh, Mama,” she whispered crossing the room in a few short steps. Sinking into the old brass bed, she felt her mother’s ghost stir. Underlying the sweet, reminiscent essence of lilacs was the residual smell of medicine. And the lingering odor of death.
How could she possibly stay in this room?
Looking around, she found it more a shrine than a bedroom. The walls were covered with pictures of Melodie at all ages, each precocious stage immortalized on film. The only photograph in the room that did not prominently feature Melodie was Grace’s wedding picture. From the bedstand, the father Melodie could not remember was blissfully unaware of his impending death. Tromped beneath a rodeo bull’s hooves, this stranger had left his young wife and three-year-old daughter a rugged patch of land and little else.
Melodie was struck anew with awe for her mother’s fortitude. A single woman raising a child and managing a ranch by herself had been unheard of at the time. An unlikely feminist, Grace Fremont had instilled in her daughter a sense of self-reliance that Melodie prayed would see her through yet another difficult time.
Grace’s remedy for just about any given situation was a homemade concoction she’d perfected. The primary ingredients were tenacity, hard work and faith in God. In the end it hadn’t been enough.
Melodie winced. It grieved her to think of her mother dying on the same bed in which she’d given birth to her only child. An ungrateful brat the world denounced for abandoning her in her time of greatest need. It pained her to think of her mother struggling from the beginning to the end of her hard-fought existence with little more comfort than could be derived from her well-worn Bible. The school of hard knocks had taught Melodie that one might as well wish upon a star as put her faith in a God who allowed good people to suffer so horribly with emotional and physical cancers.
Not that she had any special bragging rights to a better life herself, coming home as she did without a job, a husband, or a child to call her own. Coming home without so much as a heart beating inside her hollow chest. At twenty-five, Melodie’s natural beauty, exuberance and religious beliefs had been tested daily by the elements and a loveless marriage that had left her feeling both undesirable and lacking.
Her eyes scanned the photographs lining the walls for happier memories. Her favorite was the one in which she wore a frilly prom dress looking far too much like a Southern belle to suit her tastes. The smile she wore was broad and genuine and filled with expectations of wondrous things to come. It was hard to remember a time when her smile wasn’t tight and forced.
She almost didn’t recognize the fresh-faced young man beaming beside her in his rented tuxedo. Gangly at twenty, Buck had not yet grown into his features. The look of unguarded affection etched upon that youthful face was so poignant that it caused a tiny whimper of pain to escape from some place deep inside Melodie.
She grabbed a pillow from the bed and hugged it tightly, willing herself not to cry. Stiff from the long drive, weary bones protested against being curled into a fetal ball. Her shoulders bunched into twin knots of tension.
How could she have been so careless with such a precious gift of love? Like forgotten friends gathered together for an unexpected reunion, memories crowded into the small room. A smile tugged at Melodie’s heart as she recalled that long-ago prom.
It had taken some doing to convince Buck to go as her date. To him she had always been Little Bit, his employer’s pesky kid. When she first approached him about the prom, Buck frankly told her that he hadn’t much interest in going to such fancy doings when he had been in high school himself. In his early twenties, such a silly rite of passage held even less appeal for him.
But when Melodie confided red-faced that no one had asked her, his resistance softened. An outsider all of his life, Buck could certainly understand how she wouldn’t want to go stag to her senior prom. He also knew that it would break her mother’s heart not to see her only daughter all gussied up in that frothy pink formal she had been secretly sewing for the last month.
Buck would have just as soon cut off a hand as to see Grace Fremont hurt.
In truth, Melodie had known that Buck agreed to go to the prom with her more out of concern for her mother than for her. She never bothered telling him that she had, in fact, turned down two other young men who had sought her for their prom dates. Everything changed between them, however, when she came out of her room wearing a dress that showed off her budding curves, her flaxen hair swept up in a fashion that made her look older than her sixteen years. She watched a change come over Buck.
Little Bit was no more. In her place had stood a young woman who had every intention of making this man fall in love with her.
“Your boutonniere is outside,” she’d told him shyly after he’d pinned a corsage to her dress. She hoped he wouldn’t be embarrassed by such a simple token of her affection.
After Grace had taken her quota of photographs, Melodie had drawn Buck out of the house and into her mother’s garden. While she selected a perfect white rosebud from her mother’s prized blooms, she made him stand beneath the trellised archway that she hoped would someday be the focal point of their wedding. Beneath a rising moon and surrounded by the fragrant blossoms of a late spring, Melodie pinned the boutonniere to Buck’s lapel. So strong and broad and appealing was his chest that she could not resist running her hands across its width.
“Kiss me,” she had implored in a whisper so soft she wasn’t sure he’d even heard it.
His arms reached around her lithe, young body and drew her near. Slowly he’d lowered his mouth to hers to brush her lips with a tender kiss.
Brushing blond tendrils from her glowing face, Buck had admitted his own vulnerability. “If you ever hope to get to that prom, we’d better get going. I’d hate to do anything to betray your mother’s trust.”
The knowledge that Melodie could exercise womanly powers over a creature so much bigger and stronger than she was heady stuff indeed.
Feeling like a real-life Cinderella, she claimed all of Buck’s dances that magical evening as both reveled in the knowledge that before the sun set on the next day, everyone in town would know that they were a serious couple.
Nothing could have made Grace happier.
That summer after Melodie graduated and turned eighteen was truly enchanted. That was the summer they frolicked like colts and took every opportunity to steal kisses under a warm and gentle sun. That was the summer Melodie was crowned rodeo queen in the proud tradition of her mother and her grandmother before her. That was the summer Buck made up his mind to propose—but not before he could offer Melodie a lifestyle he felt she deserved. He put every dime he earned towards a ring at the local jeweler’s and simultaneously made plans to build her a dream home with his own capable hands.
Buck had restrained his masculine desires, respecting the tenets of the religion Grace had worked so hard to instill in them both and vowing to wait until he could legally make her his bride.
Melodie punched the pillow she was holding and, in the fading light of her mother’s bedroom, considered the aged water stains on the ceiling. How frustrated she had been that summer! In her mind she was all but throwing herself at Buck. Not coquettish by nature, she had employed every feminine wile in her limited power to let him know how desperately she wanted him. To no avail.
Rolling onto her stomach, Melodie rebuked herself for indulging in such sweet torture. Clinging to such tender memories all the while shaking her fist at the universe and reminiscing over what should have been served no useful purpose. No amount of wishful thinking was going to change history. She was here to make her amends with the past, to accept her responsibility in shaping it and to face the new day as her mother always had—bravely.
Dawn poked its rosy fingers through yellowed lace curtains and gently awakened Melodie to a new day. Eyes sticky with sleep, she was at first disoriented by her surroundings. It took a moment for her to discern that she had fallen asleep fully dressed upon her mother’s bed and that somebody had thoughtfully covered her with a blanket. Undoubtedly the same somebody who had brought her luggage in from her vehicle and deposited them at the foot of the bed.
How curious it was to wake up to the smell of bacon and eggs! And how odd that it made her feel suddenly queasy. During the course of her married life, if Melodie failed to rise to the challenge of such simple chores, she simply went without eating. Randall had been hard-pressed to prepare anything more complicated than a bowl of cold cereal for himself. Melodie felt a twinge of guilt at the uncharitable thought. The poor man was dead. That she felt more relief than remorse at his passing was surely sinful in itself.
As if merely wishing for release from the bonds of his possessive love had somehow been the cause of his death.
Rubbing her eyes in hopes of erasing such irrational thoughts, Melodie dragged herself out of bed, ran a brush halfheartedly through her hair and decided that her rumpled state would simply have to do. She hadn’t come home to compete in a beauty pageant. Besides, she’d wager Buck wouldn’t give her a second glance if she walked into the kitchen wearing a diamond tiara. If ever there had been any doubt in her mind that he might still be yearning for her after all this time, his reaction to her yesterday set the record straight once and for all.
The old house wasn’t pretentious enough to boast a dining room. Melodie opened the door of her mother’s bedroom and walked the short distance to the kitchen where Buck greeted her with a civil, “Good morning.”
She responded in kind, minus the good.
My, how that man could fill a room with his mere presence. Instinctively her hand went to her hair, making Melodie feel six shades a fool for even caring what he thought of how she looked.
“Did you sleep well?” he asked, handing her a plateful of steaming food.
Crooking an eyebrow at the polite inquiry, Melodie studied her scrambled eggs for any trace of arsenic.
“Fine,” she answered sliding into her place at the table. “Thank you for breakfast. And for bringing in my luggage. You didn’t have to do that. I was planning on getting to it first thing this morning.”
Buck made an attempt at a smile. “I decided that you’re right about putting our differences aside until after the funeral. After all, today’s bound to be hard on you.”
“And on you,” Melodie allowed over the ball of emotion clogging her throat. “You know, I would understand if you want to take your own vehicle to the funeral rather than going with me.”
The way he dismissed the suggestion with a wave of his hand was nothing short of mesmerizing. He’d always had such marvelous hands. Unlike Randall’s manicured hands that had been fit more for a pencil than a pair of reins, Buck’s hands were big and strong and marked by honest labor.
“That won’t be necessary,” he assured her. “We’re both grown-ups. Your mother would expect no less of us than to put aside old grudges today, so if you don’t mind, I’ll drive us both to the church.”
Melodie could do no more than nod her head gratefully. It was too much to hope that his offer was motivated as much out of concern for her as out of respect for her mother. Separated only by the expanse of a scarred, old table, it was hard not to ponder how different her life would have been had she married Buck like her heart had instructed her instead of Randall as dictated by her conscience. A conscience shaped by the rigid dogma of a religion that had somehow convinced her that eternal occupancy in hell could be purchased by one youthful mistake. Had she but been able to turn her back on that conviction, Melodie wondered if all her days might have started out with coffee and conversation instead of her usual dosage of censure and silence.
Uncomfortable with the faraway look in Melodie’s eyes, Buck bolted down his breakfast and hastened to leave, stating that he had to look after the livestock. Melodie envied him. She longed to take comfort in the kind of hard physical labor that had characterized her life. Buck wouldn’t hear of it as he bade her get ready for the long day ahead.
