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He still wasn’t sure he knew the answer, so he responded with a simple if incomplete truth. “I got a call from Hudson’s PI.”
“Good to know the guy’s finally earned some of the big bucks our brother-in-law is paying him.”
“It looks like Hudson has a few bucks to spare,” Luke noted, turning his head to encompass the whole room.
“That he does,” Danny agreed. “Although it was actually Jamie’s wife who started the search last year. Fallon tracked down Dana in Oregon, but she hit a lot of dead ends after that and Hudson offered to take the lead.”
It was obvious to both of them that Bella’s husband had a lot more resources to throw at the task—and more success as a result.
“Over the years, I’d given a lot of thought to reaching out to our siblings, but I’m not sure I ever would have found the courage to come back if Bradford hadn’t made contact.”
“We’ve all been carrying a lot of baggage for a lot of years,” Danny noted. “Maybe it’s time to let it go and make a fresh start.”
It sounded like a good idea to Luke, but he wasn’t sure it was possible. “Was it that easy for you?” he asked.
“It wasn’t easy at all,” his brother said. “But it was necessary.”
Luke swallowed another mouthful of coffee.
“So how long are you planning to stay?” Danny asked.
“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” he admitted.
“There’s no specific date that you’re expected back in Wyoming?”
He shook his head. “My boss told me to take as much time as I needed.”
“Then you can stay for my wedding.”
He recalled Bella mentioning plans for a Christmas Eve wedding. “December 24 is still two-and-a-half weeks away.”
“Two-and-a-half weeks isn’t a lot of time after so many years,” his brother pointed out.
But if he was there for Danny’s Christmas Eve wedding, Luke suspected that Bella would insist he stay for Christmas and he wasn’t accustomed to celebrating the holidays. In fact, he hadn’t celebrated anything in a very long time.
Sensing his hesitation, Danny said, “It would mean a lot to me to have you there.”
“Bella and Hudson might not want me hanging around that long,” he warned.
“In this house, Bella and Hudson won’t even know you’re here,” Danny said.
“I’ll think about it,” he decided.
“Or maybe there’s another reason you don’t want to stay,” his brother allowed. “Maybe it’s not just cattle and chores waiting for you back in Wyoming.”
Luke looked at him blankly.
“Maybe there’s a special lady anxiously awaiting your return?” Danny suggested.
He immediately shook his head. “No, there’s no one in Wyoming.”
But as soon as the words were out of his mouth, an image of the pretty blonde from the doughnut shop popped into his mind. Eva. As pretty and sweet and tempting as the biblical figure for which she was named.
“No one in Wyoming,” Danny echoed curiously. “Does that mean there’s someone waiting for you somewhere else?”
Luke shook his head again, attempting to shake the image loose. “No,” he denied. “There’s no one at all.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I like being on my own, with no one to depend on me but me.”
“And no one to rely on but you, too,” Danny pointed out as he pushed away from the table and went to the refrigerator.
“It works for me,” he insisted.
“I thought it worked for me, too, but I was only kidding myself.” He pulled out the tray of snacks Bella had prepared and set it in the middle of the table. “I missed a lot of years with Annie and Janie, but I’m determined to make up for that now.”
“I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that you’re a father—to an eleven-year-old.”
“It’s been an adjustment for everyone,” Danny admitted. “And as much as I want to hate Hank—Annie’s ex—because he got to be there when Janie was born, to hold her as a baby, soothe her when she was crying, witness her first steps and take her to school on her first day, I can’t. The truth is, I’m grateful that he was there for them, because I wasn’t.”
“You didn’t know,” Luke reminded him.
His brother nodded, though he didn’t seem reassured by the fact. “Anyway, I can’t wait for you to meet her,” he said, the pride in his voice unmistakable. “She’s smart and funny and absolutely beautiful.”
“She must look like her mom, then,” Luke teased.
“That she does,” Danny agreed. “But the shape of her eyes and the stubborn tilt of her chin are just like our mom.”
Luke reached for a cube of cheese.
“Mom and Dad’s first grandchild.”
His brother nodded. “When I found out that Janie was my daughter, when I got over the shock, I couldn’t help but think of Mom and Dad—how they would have responded to the news that they were grandparents.”
“They would have been thrilled,” he said and popped the cheese into his mouth.
“Yeah,” Danny said. “But only after Dad kicked my ass into next week for getting Annie pregnant.”
“He would have done exactly that,” Bella said from the doorway.
Both Luke and Danny turned. “We didn’t hear you come in.”
“You were preoccupied with your journey down memory lane—without me,” she said, sounding just a little piqued.
“It’s a long road,” Danny pointed out. “And we only just got started.”
“I don’t really mind.” She settled into the empty chair between them. “I’m just so glad that you’re both finally home again.”
Luke felt something inside twist painfully. “Rust Creek Falls isn’t my home, Bella. Not anymore.”
She tipped her chin up and met his gaze squarely. “Of course it is,” she insisted. “And after you’ve spent some time here, you’ll realize it’s true.”
“Bella.” He touched a hand to her arm, hoping the contact might ease the harshness of the truth she needed to hear. “I’ve been living in Wyoming for twelve years—that’s my home now.”
“But you’ve never stayed in any one place for more than two years,” she pointed out.
He frowned. “How do you know that?”
“It’s one of the reasons it took Hudson’s PI so long to track you down. The other reason—” she pinned him with a look “—is that Luke Stockton somehow became Lee Stanton.”
He picked up a cherry tomato and popped it into his mouth, but his sister wasn’t letting him off the hook.
“Why?” she demanded.
Before he could respond, Danny’s cell phone buzzed. “That’s my cue to run,” he said. “Annie went to Kalispell this afternoon for a dress fitting, so I have to pick Janie up from her study group at school.”
Luke pushed away from the table and stood up, offering his hand to his brother. Danny shook his hand, then pulled him in for another hug.
“Stop by anytime,” he urged his brother. “I know Annie will be happy to see you, and I’m eager for you to meet my daughter.”
“I will,” Luke promised.
Then Danny gave Bella a quick hug, too, before he disappeared down the hall.
“Now,” Bella said, turning her focus back to Luke, “answer my question.”
“What question was that?” he hedged, selecting a broccoli spear from the plate.
She snatched it out of his hand before he could lift it to his mouth and held it away from him. “Why were you living in Wyoming as Lee Stanton?”
“It wasn’t intentional,” Luke told her. “At least, not at first. The bookkeeper at the ranch we were working put me on the payroll as ‘Stanton’ by mistake and it just seemed like too much effort to try to correct it. When I moved on, I continued to use Stanton so that I could reference my work history under that name. And, in some ways, it was easier to start a new life with a new name.”
“But why did you want a new life?” she pressed. “Why did you leave?”
He heard the confusion in her question—and the hurt. “It wasn’t an easy decision to make,” he admitted, wanting to explain the past and soothe his sister. “But what choice did we have? The ranch was going to be taken by the bank, and the grandparents didn’t have room to take us all in—and no interest in doing so. As Gramps said, we were legal adults and they had no obligation to provide us with food or shelter.”
Bella’s dark brown eyes filled with tears. “I always suspected that they made you leave.”
“They didn’t make us leave, but they didn’t give us any reason to stay, either. And we thought Jamie, you, Liza and Dana would all be together.”
“After they sent Liza and Dana away—” she swiped at a tear that spilled onto her cheek “—there were times I wish they’d sent me and Jamie away, too.”
“Was it really so bad?” Luke asked.
“Probably not. We had a roof over our heads and meals on the table. But there was no affection. There was rarely even any warmth or kindness.”
“I’m so sorry, Bella.”
She shrugged. “It’s water under the bridge now. Or mostly, anyway. Because it turns out that you were wrong about the ranch.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sunshine Farm doesn’t belong to the bank—it belongs to us.”
“To you and Hudson?” he guessed, because it seemed a reasonable assumption. Bella’s husband obviously had a ton of money, and it was just as obvious he would spend it all to make his wife happy. If the property had been for sale, Luke could imagine Hudson buying it for her without blinking an eye.
But she shook her head. “To you, Bailey, Danny, Jamie, me, Liza and Dana.”
He stared at her, uncomprehending. “But...how?”
“When Dad remortgaged the property to fix the barn and buy the new equipment, he also bought mortgage insurance.”
Luke was stunned. Even at twenty-one, he’d had a pretty good picture of the tight financial situation at Sunshine Farm. He’d heard his parents talking about it in hushed and worried tones when they thought their children were asleep. He’d recognized the strain in his father’s voice, seen it in the lines that furrowed his mother’s brow. He’d listened to them argue about the purchase of secondhand equipment that they couldn’t afford but desperately needed to keep the ranch operating, and he knew that they’d had to remortgage the property. He hadn’t known they’d also arranged for insurance on that mortgage.
He and Bailey and Danny had left because they hadn’t believed that there was any other option. For the past twelve years, they’d worked for other people when they could have been working at Sunshine Farm. Or maybe it was naive to think that they might have been able to keep the ranch going—a difficult enough task when Rob Stockton had been around to oversee the operation. More likely, Luke and his brothers would have run the ranch into the ground and been forced to sell anyway.
“We just discovered that the property had been transferred into all of our names, pursuant to the terms of Mom and Dad’s will, a few months ago when Zach Dalton approached Jamie to see if we were interested in selling,” Bella explained.
“Are you going to sell?” he asked.
“That’s a decision we have to make together,” she said. “All of us.”
“I guess that explains why you’re so eager for a family reunion,” he noted.
“We only found out about the property a few months ago,” she said again. “We’ve been looking for you a lot longer than that.” She smiled again. “And now you’re finally here.”
“Are you sure Hudson doesn’t mind me crashing here? Because I can call Melba Strickland to—”
“No,” Bella interjected firmly. “Hudson doesn’t mind, and no, you’re not staying at Strickland’s Boarding House when you’ve got family here.”
He turned his hand over and linked his fingers with hers. “I missed you,” he confessed, his voice quiet. “All of you.”
“Then why didn’t you ever come home?”
He could understand her confusion. She had no way of knowing that his leaving had been prompted not just by grief over the loss of their parents but by guilt—because he was responsible for their being out on the road that night. In addition to all the other factors, that truth was what had compelled him to leave Rust Creek Falls—a futile effort to escape the daily reminders of the mistakes he’d made.
He owed Bella the truth. After all this time, she deserved to know the real reason he went away. But she seemed so happy to see him, and it felt so good to be welcome. The happy light in her eyes warmed the deepest, darkest places in his soul, and Luke didn’t want to dim that light.
Not yet.
“You know what? It doesn’t matter,” she decided when he remained silent. “It only matters that you’re here now. And—fingers crossed—Bailey and Liza will soon be, too.”
“I don’t know if this helps at all, but the last time I saw Bailey, he was heading to New Mexico with his fiancée,” Luke said.
“Then Hudson’s PI will be heading to New Mexico next,” she decided.
“What’s in New Mexico?” her husband asked, walking in with a couple of flat boxes in hand.
