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“It’s part of her charm.”
His lips eased into the suggestion of a smile. “It’s good to see you, Kristi.”
“You, too.” Her gaze focused on the doorknob, not on him.
“You haven’t changed a bit.”
Her head snapped around, a blaze of irritation in her blue eyes. “Yes, I have. I’m almost six years older and ten pounds fatter than when you last saw me.”
In a lazy perusal, he took in her appearance, noting the subtle changes—her breasts a little fuller, her hips more womanly. “On you it looks good.”
Her cheeks blossomed with a rosy blush, and she huffed, looking away again. “Thanks for helping me with Grandma. You can go now.”
“That sounds like you want to get rid of me.”
“I do. I have to get Grandma settled, fix her something to eat. No need for you to hang around.”
Her curt tone was meant to cut, and he felt a youthful stab of rejection. “Are you going to be staying long?”
“A few days. I’m not sure yet.”
He tapped his hat back onto his head and, sliding his hands into his jeans’ pockets, he nodded. “Give me a call if Doc needs anything.”
“I’m sure we’ll get along fine without you.”
What the hell was the matter with her? The summer they’d met she’d been as sweet as a newborn colt, prancing and dancing, filled with excitement about the future. Together they’d experienced the first bloom of young love. At least, he had.
Then they’d moved on with their lives. Within days he’d been so overwhelmed with his medical studies that he’d barely been able to keep his head above water academically. She’d probably been in nearly the same fix with her premed courses. She sure hadn’t found the time to call him.
When they’d both headed off for school, he’d been afraid a long-distance relationship wouldn’t work. He’d even told her so. She’d argued they could manage it.
It hadn’t taken long to discover he’d been right.
He shrugged, pretending indifference. “Maybe we’ll have a chance to get together before you leave, talk about old times.”
She started to speak, but before she got a word out there was a staccato knock on the front door, and it opened.
“Yoo-hoo, it’s only me! Hetty Moore.” The owner of the general store swooped into the house, a heavy winter jacket covering her floral-print dress, a casserole dish in her hands. “I saw the car outside and thought—My sakes, is that little Kristi all grown up?”
Kristi eased past Rory, grateful for the interruption. With his chiseled features, burnished complexion and midnight-black hair, he was simply too potent, too masculine for her comfort. And he brought back far too many memories she’d valiantly tried to suppress. Her emotions were bouncing all over the place—residual anger, a too-foolish joy at seeing him and a clawing fear that her return to Grass Valley might be a terrible mistake.
There’d been no way she could refuse her grandmother’s request to help her—not the woman who had been her mentor and had once saved her life.
She’d known that in coming here she would have to face Rory sooner or later. She’d hoped for a little more time to adjust to the idea, to prepare herself for what she had to tell him. As usual, when it came to Rory Oakes, her wish hadn’t been granted.
“Hello, Mrs. Moore. How are you?”
“Fit as can be. And aren’t you just as pretty as ever. Isn’t that so, Rory?”
He’d come up behind Kristi, close enough that she imagined she could feel the heat of his body, his raging metabolism. Her own flesh warmed at the thought, the memory of how he had once held her in his ardent embrace. In the hallway, he’d towered over her. Even now with her back turned to him, he dominated the entire room and every molecule of her awareness.
“Yes, ma’am.” he said. “I was just telling her that.”
With hands that trembled, Kristi set aside her grandmother’s crutches and took the casserole dish from Hetty. “Thank you. I was just going to fix something for Grandma to eat. She hates hospital food.”
“It’s only hot dogs and macaroni but it’s one of Justine’s favorites. Can’t think why she didn’t ask a neighbor to pick her up in Great Falls instead of having you come all this way.”
“Yes, well, she wanted me to—”
From the bathroom Justine shouted, “You folks gonna strand me in here forever? Somebody bring me those darn crutches.”
“I’ll get ’em.”
Rory reached past Kristi for the crutches, and she quickly scooted out of his way. Even so, she caught the scent of his sheepskin jacket, an elemental fragrance much like the man himself. He wore his cowboy hat low on his forehead, shadowing his dark eyes and concealing his jet-black hair, creating the air of a loner.
There was another knock on the front door.
“That’ll be Marlene Huhn,” Hetty said. “Probably bringing some of her German potato salad for Justine to gag down. She uses too much vinegar, you know.”
Involuntarily, Kristi’s lips puckered. She remembered the dish from church potlucks. “I’ll let her in.”
On the porch, she discovered Valery Haywood had arrived along with Marlene Huhn. The two women, their faces etched from years of exposure to the Montana sun, squeezed inside together, not wanting the other one to get a head start on the latest gossip.
“I brought some ham mixed with the string beans I put up from the garden last summer,” Mrs. Haywood said. “Thought Justine would enjoy some veggies.”
“I brought my hot potato salad. Made it special for Justine.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you both.” Without a free hand to take the dishes, Kristi gestured toward the kitchen. “Could you put them in the refrigerator for me?”
“Ja, we can do that. How is Justine? We all just felt awful about her falling down,” Marlene said, still a trace of a German accent in her voice.
“She’s a little cranky but I’m sure—”
Justine hobbled into the living room on her crutches, Rory helping her. “You’d be cranky, too, little girl, if you had to haul around twenty pounds of plaster attached to your foot.” With an irritated sigh, she plopped down on the chintz-covered couch.
Kristi rolled her eyes. In her experience as a registered nurse—and more recently as a nurse practitioner—doctors made the worst possible patients. Her grandmother was no exception. The next couple of weeks, while Justine recovered from her injury and Kristi assisted with her medical practice, were going to be difficult at best.
Within minutes, more neighbors arrived until the refrigerator was crammed with casseroles and the kitchen table covered with cakes and pies. Most of the ladies stayed to visit, crowding into the small living room.
“Tell us, Kristi,” Hetty said, “what have you been up to these past few years? Your grandmother never talks much about you or your mother. How’s your family, dear?”
Justine snorted. “I don’t gossip like some folks I know, if that’s what you’re getting at. I’ve got better things to do with my time.”
Kristi’s gaze slid to Rory, who was standing on the far side of the room. He’d removed his hat and was smiling at her, his dark eyes filled with amusement at the antics of the well-meaning town busy-bodies. Her heart lunged at the sight of him, skipping a beat, and an unwelcome ache of loneliness filled her chest.
Mentally she redefined the next two weeks from difficult to impossible. That she had agreed to come here at all was clear evidence she’d lost every ounce of good sense she’d ever possessed.
The very last thing she wanted was for Rory to be privy to a conversation about her and her family.
“Ladies, I know my grandmother appreciates your concern and all the food you’ve brought, but she’s had a long, difficult few days since she broke her ankle. Give her some time to catch up on her rest. Then she’ll be happy to visit with you, I’m sure.”
Holding her breath while the neighbor ladies said their goodbyes, Kristi deliberately avoided looking at Rory, which didn’t prevent her from feeling his gaze on her. Boring into her psyche. Probing her secret thoughts.
Her sense of guilt brought a flush to her face, and she knew darn well she looked as guilty as she felt, like a five-year-old who had snitched more than one cookie from the cookie jar. Which in a way, she had.
Finally, after the others had left and the room grew quiet, Rory got the hint.
“Guess I’d better be going, too.” He sauntered across the room toward her.
“Yes, that would be best—for Grandma.”
“Shoot, honey,” Justine said, “those folks brought us enough food for an army. Might as well ask Rory to stay for supper.”
Kristi blanched. “No, I don’t think—”
“Thanks, anyway, Doc. I’ve got an injured elk in my back pen that I’ve got to feed. He fell through some thin river ice a couple of weeks back and got stuck.” He tugged the collar of his coat up around his neck, winked at Kristi and lowered his voice. “I’ve never been too fond of Marlene Huhn’s potato salad, anyway.”
By the time the door closed behind Rory, Kristi knew she wouldn’t be able to draw an easy breath until she was miles from Grass Valley and her secret was safe again.
She’d been a fool to come here at all, no matter how much her grandmother had begged on the phone from her hospital bed. The people of Grass Valley could drive a few extra miles for the next two weeks if they needed doctoring.
She shouldn’t have risked returning to the town—or the man who had broken her heart. Forget her conscience had been bothering her for years for not telling him the truth. He’d been the one who hadn’t returned her phone calls. He was the one who’d found someone else.
Her stomach knotted in despair.
She would be the one to suffer if she didn’t confront Rory and her fears. Until she did that, she’d never be able to get on with her life, because no other man had ever come close to comparing with her memories of Rory.
THE YOUNG ELK SCRAMBLED to the far side of the chain-link enclosure, his injured foreleg making his gait awkward. He turned to glare at Rory with his huge brown eyes and pawed the ground, kicking up dirt and the remnants of the last snow storm.
“It’s all right, youngster.” Rory broke the skin of ice from the watering trough, then forked some hay into the feeding bin. “Another week or so, and you’ll be good to go again.”
It had been lucky some local snowmobilers spotted the elk trapped in river ice or the animal would have died. Rory, as the area’s only veterinarian and a wild-life rehabilitator, got the call to rescue the animal. At the time, the elk hadn’t been too appreciative of Rory’s efforts.
He still wasn’t being exactly friendly.
Which was good. Rory had no intention of making the elk a pet. Just the opposite. He intended to return the elk to the wild as soon as the youngster was able to keep up with the herd. Rory didn’t want the animal to become dependent on humans for either food or comfort. Generally, elk and deer did well in confinement and returned to the wild without a problem.
He stabbed the pitchfork into the pile of hay and let it rest there. April was always a tough month this far north, almost to the Canadian border. Winter had gone on too long; the warmth of spring was weeks off yet. Summer was only a vague promise.
Only the sturdy—or obstinate—survived in this climate. He figured he was a little bit of both.
Tugging the pitchfork free, he ambled back toward the clinic and outbuildings, which were adjacent to the small clapboard house where he lived. Grass Valley wasn’t a big town—a single main street boasting of a general store, a drugstore that sold more ice cream than antibiotics, a busy saloon and a garage surrounded by derelict cars—all of which Rory could see from his couple of acres of land a block away.
Beyond the little town a pine-covered hill rose above a shallow river. The slash of dirt and rock left by a landslide last summer still scarred the hillside, and if it hadn’t been for Rory, his brothers and Joe Moore, the tumble of boulders would have blocked the river, flooding the town of Grass Valley. Instead they’d blown big rocks into little ones, allowing the flow of water to continue downstream. A pretty nerve-racking day, as Rory recalled.
Pausing near the walkway to his house, he glanced across the street to the medical clinic and let his thoughts slip further back in time.
When Kristi visited her grandmother nearly six years ago, Rory hadn’t anything to offer her for the long term. He’d been little more than a kid himself, about to enter veterinary medicine school and not all that confident he would be able to finish the rigorous course of study. His past included years in foster care, a few adolescent brushes with the law and finally adoption by Oliver Oakes, who had owned the Double O Ranch outside of town.
He’d had no guaranteed future at all.
Now he had a veterinary practice and a home that belonged to him and the Bank of Montana—in unequal shares. Plus, he was steadily wearing down the balance due on his student loans.
But from the way Kristi had avoided his gaze and her less-than-eager greeting, he doubted she’d be interested to learn he was making a success of himself.
He shoved his hands into his pockets and concentrated on the sounds of Mother Earth—the wind moving through the bare branches of the elm tree in his front yard, the crackling of dry grass as a rabbit dashed unseen through the vacant land nearby, the flight of a hawk’s wings through the air.
Jimmy Deer Running, the chief of the Blackfeet tribe on the nearby reservation, had told Rory not to resent the past but to learn from it. That wasn’t always an easy thing to do. Hell, most of the time he wasn’t even sure what lesson he was supposed to be learning.
Like why Kristi had never called or written to him after their summer together.
Why the hell didn’t you call her?
In retrospect, that seemed like a big mistake.
Maybe that explained her standoffish reception today. Maybe she was mad at him. Or maybe she was having the proverbial morning-after regrets some five-plus years later. He supposed he couldn’t blame her in either case.
Women were so darn hard to understand.
Glancing up at the darkening sky, he wondered if the predicted storm front was still moving their way from Canada. Spring weather could be the pits. Just when you were ready to get rid of winter, bam! another wicked storm would come through, and you’d be ready to move to Arizona.
Of course, as soon as the storm passed and the wildflowers bloomed, you’d remember Montana was God’s country.
Until the next winter.
Instead of going into his house to eat supper alone and watch reruns on TV, he decided to check in with his brother Eric. He could see the lights were still on in the sheriff’s office on Main Street.
Maybe he could talk ol’ White Eyes into having a beer with him at the Grass Valley Saloon, which featured “good eats” according to the banner that had hung in the window for as long as Rory could remember.
Tomorrow he’d start getting reacquainted with Kristi. She wouldn’t be around long. He intended to work as quickly as possible.
Smiling to himself, he sauntered toward Main Street.
Not many men get a second chance.
AS SHE WAS TRYING to rearrange too many casserole dishes into too small a refrigerator, Kristi happened to glance out the kitchen window.
Rory.
Her breath caught at the sight of his easy stride as he headed toward the center of town. Long and lanky, strolling along as though he had no cares in the world.
Meanwhile, her thoughts were a jumble.
Soon—very soon—she’d have to tell Rory the truth about what happened after their summer together.
Except, she had tried, more than once. And he hadn’t cared enough about her to return her phone calls when she’d desperately needed to talk to him nearly six years ago. His silence had added an exclamation point to their argument about maintaining a long-distance relationship.
She’d lost that battle—in spades.
