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Sprays of forsythia and flowering quince graced the rock garden she’d made at the corner of the old-fashioned porch. It was her favorite spot at her favorite time of day.
The swing gave off a soft but pleasant squeak with each backward sweep of the chain on its hook. She was comforted by the familiar sound. Tonight she needed comforting. For some reason, the past, with its harsh regrets, crowded her thoughts.
The sky darkened and stars crept out, shyly at first, then more and more until the heavens were filled. With an effort she staved off the old memories, induced by her tenants, she realized. Jess Fargo and his son reminded her of the possibilities of life, of the family she’d once assumed she would have. Shaking her head slightly, she pushed the cold emptiness of old dreams back into their cubbyhole.
Just as she was thinking it was time to go in to bed, a shadow appeared at the corner of the house, causing every nerve in her body to jump.
Jess limped across the grass and up on the porch. “That swing is driving me nuts,” he said by way of explanation. “I brought some grease.”
Without another word, he pulled a chair over to the swing, stood on it and oiled the hook. Moving back, he advised her to try it. The swing made no noise when she moved.
“Thanks,” she said, injecting sincerity into the word.
“It wasn’t for you. It was for me.” He moved the chair back to its position, then stood near the steps.
When he didn’t leave, she hesitated, then invited him to join her. Expecting him to take the chair, she was startled anew when he settled on the swing with a weary sigh.
“Your leg is bothering you?” she asked, sympathy winning out over other, harder emotions.
“Yeah, and then some,” he agreed wryly.
“I know,” she said softly, remembering the ache that lasted long after the actual pain disappeared.
“Look,” he said, “I didn’t mean to sound weird this afternoon. It’s just that I’m worried about the boy. He’s having a hard time, and he’s…vulnerable.”
“He needs someone. You, I think. It’s good that you’ve been doing things together.”
“You think so?”
She was surprised at the hope in his voice. So the tough cop needed assurances, too. “Absolutely.”
After a few minutes he exhaled deeply and relaxed against the wooden slats. She started the swing to moving. They swished back and forth while crickets chirped and the wind whispered of secrets millions of years old.
She heard the lazy caw of a crow in the alders down by the creek. “The wind raven,” she murmured.
“What?”
Kate stirred self-consciously. “It’s an old story my grandmother told us. She said an Indian woman told it to her grandmother when she was a child. When the raven caws before dawn, when the wind blows down the mountain rather than up the valley, dire happenings are foretold. My grandmother’s mother heard the ravens before her husband and son were killed by a falling tree. My grandmother said she heard the crows down by the creek the night her baby died. And the wind was blowing.”
As if on cue, the cold night air swept around the eaves with a low moan. Her father had explained the house moaned because it wasn’t built right for wind, but as a child, she’d thought the wind and the house knew when tragedy was coming. The hair prickled on the back of her neck.
“Do you believe in myths?”
His voice was as soft, as sorrowful, as that of the wind, its deeper cadence blending with the whisperings of the river alders. The prickle became a tremor that raced through her.
“I believe there are things the mind can comprehend and others that only the heart knows and still others that no one understands.” She spoke barely above a whisper herself.
He moved, turning slightly as if to study her, laying his arm along the back of the swing, crossing his sore knee over the other while he watched her. She became uneasy.
“What bothers you about me?” he asked.
The silence grew—a mound of unsaid words between them. “Your unhappiness,” she said at last. “Your dislike and disapproval for no reason that I know of.”
“I don’t dislike you,” he said, so low she nearly didn’t catch the words.
“Your distrust…of women or everyone?”
His laugh was bitter. “Of life.”
“I understand.”
“I doubt it.” He was back to tough, cynical.
“I was married twelve years ago today. Barely past my twenty-first birthday.”
“It wasn’t a happy union,” he guessed.
“My father didn’t want me to, but nothing would have stopped me, not even a gypsy with a genuine crystal ball that showed me what my life would be like if I went through with the ceremony. I probably knew without the crystal ball.”
“But you did it, anyway.”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“We fought the good fight, one might say, but it didn’t work for us. Not all the love or hope or faith in the world could change what was inevitable.”
“You divorced.”
“No. He died.”
“How?”
She heard the sharpened interest of the experienced cop in the question. She couldn’t decide how much to tell him or if she wanted him to know. Suicide. She hadn’t said the word in four years, and she wasn’t sure she could say it now.
“Suicide?” he said before she could get the word out, again in the deep tone that harmonized with the wind.
A raven cawed. Another answered.
“Yes.” The emptiness returned and with it the memories of a fate she had been powerless to change, although at twenty-one, she had thought she could. By the time she was twenty-nine, she had known she couldn’t.
“Go,” the raven called from the river bank. “Go.”
She rose and went inside without another word.
The wind came up during the night, sluicing down the mountain, pouring into the valley, bringing lightning and the promise of rain. At dawn the rain still held off, but the clouds lingered like a lid clamped over the land, holding in the growing tempest.
Kate rose and dressed in fresh jeans, tank top and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. The temperature was in the low fifties. She put on coffee, then ate her usual bowl of cereal.
Standing by the kitchen windows, she watched the wind toss the branches of the alders. The sky was dark, threatening. Along the edge of the mountain nearest her, she stared at the curtain of white without realizing what it was.
“Hail,” she said as the first white balls began to hit the glass and skip along the grass. She saw it tear through a leaf of a bush, then knock a flower off another.
The garden! The hail would ruin her carefully tended lettuce and beans and sweet peas. It would rip through the broad leaves of the cucumbers, squash and pumpkins. She slipped into old loafers and ran to the garden shed for the drop cloths that served multiple purposes around a ranch.
The wind beat at her, so hard it felt as if it would tear her clothes from her body. The hailstones, all nearly the size of marbles, hit with ferocious tenacity. She secured a corner of the drop cloth with a rock and tried to cover the row of lettuce. The wind whipped the material from her fingers.
“I’ll get it.” Jess reached across her and grabbed the flailing cloth and put it into place. “Get one of those big rocks,” he told his son.
Between the three of them, they got the most vulnerable vegetables covered. As they ran for the house, the rain started, lashing across the land in long, shimmering curtains.
“Wow, I don’t think the weatherman predicted that,” Kate said with a laugh once they were safely inside the kitchen. She tossed towels to her helpers, then dried herself off.
She checked her clothing to make sure she was decent. When she glanced up, Jess was watching her. The quickly hidden flare in his eyes told her he remembered their first meeting. His words of the night before leaped into her mind.
Desire flamed in her, echoing her restless night. She missed the heat, the pleasure of sex, the deep satisfaction and closeness afterward. In those early years of marriage, when hope still reigned, she had sought it eagerly. Later she had tried to use it as a bond to help her husband live in the present, but he had retreated more and more into the past, to places where she had never been and couldn’t go.
“I have coffee,” she said rather abruptly, turning from her guest’s steady perusal. “This feels like a pancake-and-sausage morning to me. How about you?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said enthusiastically, pulling the towel over his hair as if he were polishing a shoe. He glanced at his father. “Uh, if we have time.”
Only a curmudgeon could have denied the youngster’s eager hunger. Kate looked at Jess. The corners of his mouth tightened, but he nodded.
She threw her towel on top of the washing machine in the adjoining room, then started preparing the meal. Jess and Jeremy followed her example but took seats at the table. She served coffee to the older male and cocoa to the younger one.
After they ate, Jeremy asked to be excused. He wanted to check on his e-mail. Kate grinned as he thanked her, then bounded out and across the wet yard, jumping puddles. As soon as he was inside, the rain came pouring down again.
“This might last all day,” she informed Jess. “The roads won’t be passable at low spots.”
“So I shouldn’t go to town?”
“I’d give it an hour or so after the rain has stopped for the roads to drain.”
“I will. Today seems a good day for staying in and reading, anyway. You have any books?”
“In the study. First door on the right down the hall. Choose anything you like. I’ll bring fresh coffee.”
When she brought in their mugs, she found Jess standing in front of the bookshelves. He continued to read over the titles. “You have quite a collection of Western lore here.”
“My family has collected first editions for generations.”
“Some of these might be valuable.”
“The ones behind the glass doors are. The others aren’t. Except to me.”
He moved over to the glass-fronted bookcases. “Mark Twain. Bret Hart. What’s this? Mrs. Beeton’s Every Day Cookery and Housekeeping Book?
“Household hints from 1865,” Kate explained. “The author was English.”
He glanced through the volume. “It says here that all the household belongs to the husband, and the wife must look after his interests well. Sounds like a sensible female.”
Kate frowned in annoyance that he would happen upon that advice out of the whole book. He turned and she saw his smile widen as he took in her expression. She realized he was teasing her. Well, the tough cop had a sense of humor.
“Yes. My father pointed that out to my mother one time,” she admitted.
“What did she do?”
“Hit him with the dust mop.”
When Jess chuckled, Kate laughed, too. While he selected a couple of police procedural mysteries, she mused on their moment of laughter. It had been a long time since this house had heard the shared laughter of a man and woman.
And longer before it would happen again. She wanted no part of Jess Fargo. She left him in the den and returned to the kitchen, continuing her silent lecture on men and women and the whole absurd misery of it all.
Sitting at the kitchen table, watching the storm worsen, she tried to push the memories back into the past and lock the door. She had always been moody around the time of her wedding anniversary, but this year the hurt seemed nearer the surface.
Because of Jess?
Because somehow he and his son reminded her of all the bright hope she had once held dear to her heart. But she had learned that love wasn’t enough. It couldn’t change fate.
Touching her abdomen briefly, she experienced the pain of shattered youth and dreams, of accepting the reality, the nightmare, that her life had become…and yet, with the stubbornness of the young, she had dared hope….
Until that terrible, final day.
Needing to be busy, she set about rinsing the plates and putting them in the dishwasher. Her tenant limped into the kitchen, bringing three books tucked under his arm. She said nothing while he refilled his cup and laid the books on the table. He offered to help clean up.
“There’s nothing to do.” While he sat at the table, she wiped the skillet and grill with a paper towel and put them away. Restless, she made two cherry pies. With them in the oven, she, too, sat and stared morosely at the rain.
“You’re quiet,” he mentioned after a long silence. “And introspective. Are you thinking about your marriage?”
“About love.”
His face hardened.
“Yeah, I don’t think much of the emotion, either. It’s a trap for women—”
“You think it isn’t for men?” he said in a near snarl.
She shrugged. Their eyes met and held. Behind the smoldering animosity, she saw something else—the hunger, raw and naked, all male, but beyond that—the pure lonely need of one person for another.
She turned her head, refusing to acknowledge the mutual emotion. But it impinged on the mind just the same. It was the same need that gnawed at her.
A hand touched her chin, bringing her back to face him. “It’s there. We can deny it, but it’s there.”
His tone was harsh, and he didn’t look at all pleased.
“What?” she asked, lifting her chin defiantly.
“You know.”
