LITMIR.BIZ

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      She found a message on her answering machine and played it. Her father, as she’d feared, was suffering his usual bout of winter bronchitis and his doctor wouldn’t let him go on an airplane for fear of what it would do to his sick lungs. And he didn’t feel at all like a bus or train trip, so Antonia would have to come home for Christmas, he said, or they’d each have to spend it alone.

      She sat down heavily on the floral couch she’d purchased at a local furniture store and sighed. She didn’t want to go home. If she could have found a reasonable excuse, she wouldn’t have, either. But it would be impossible to leave her father sick and alone on the holidays. With resolution, she picked up the telephone and booked a seat on the next commuter flight to Billings, where the nearest airport to Bighorn was located.

      Because Wyoming was so sparsely populated, it was lacking in airports. Powell Long, now wealthy and able to afford all the advantages, had an airstrip on his ranch. But there was nowhere in Bighorn that a commercial aircraft, even a commuter one, could land. She knew that Barrie’s stepbrother had a Learjet and that he had a landing strip near Bighorn on his own ranch, but she would never have presumed on Barrie’s good nature to ask for that sort of favor. Besides, she admitted to herself, she was as intimidated by Dawson Rutherford as Barrie was. He, like Powell, was high-powered and aggressively masculine. Antonia felt much safer seated on an impersonal commuter plane.

      She rented a car at the airport in Billings and, with the easy acceptance of long distances on the road from her time in Arizona, she set out for Bighorn.

      The countryside was lovely. There were scattered patches of snow, something she hadn’t thought about until it was too late and she’d already rented the car. There was snow on the ground in Billings, quite a lot of it, and although the roads were mostly clear, she was afraid of icy patches. She’d get out, somehow, she told herself. But she did wish that she’d had the forethought to ask her father about the local weather when she’d phoned to say she was leaving Tucson on an early-morning flight. But he was hoarse and she hadn’t wanted to stress his voice too much. He knew when she was due to arrive, though, and if she was too long overdue, she was certain that he’d send someone to meet her.

      She gazed lovingly at the snow-covered mountains, thinking of how she’d missed this country that was home to her, home to generations of her family. There was so much of her history locked into these sweeping mountain ranges and valleys, where lodgepole pines stood like sentinels over shallow, wide blue streams. The forests were green and majestic, looking much as they must have when mountain men plied their trade here. Arizona had her own forests, too, and mountains. But Wyoming was another world. It was home.

      The going got rough the closer to home she went. It was just outside Bighorn that her car slipped on a wide patch of ice and almost went into a ditch. She knew all too well that if she had, there would have been no way she could get the vehicle out, because the slope was too deep.

      With a prayer of thanks, she made it into the small town of Bighorn, past the Methodist Church and the post office and the meat locker building to her father’s big Victorian house on a wide street off the main thoroughfare. She parked in the driveway under a huge cottonwood tree. How wonderful to be home for Christmas!

      There was a decorated tree in the window, all aglow with the lights and ornaments that had been painstakingly purchased over a period of years. She looked at one, a crystal deer, and remembered painfully that Powell had given it to her the Christmas they’d become engaged. She’d thought of smashing it after his desertion, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The tiny thing was so beautiful, so fragile; like their destroyed relationship. So long ago.

      Her father came to the door in a bathrobe and pajamas, sniffling.

      He hugged her warmly. “I’m so glad you came, girl,” he said hoarsely, and coughed a little. “I’m much better, but the damn doctor wouldn’t let me fly!”

      “And rightly so,” she replied. “You don’t need pneumonia!”

      He grinned at her. “I reckon not. Can you stay until New Year’s?”

      She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I have to go back the day after Christmas.” She didn’t mention her upcoming doctor’s appointment. There was no need to worry him.

      “Well, you’ll be here for a week, anyway. We won’t get to go out much, I’m afraid, but we can keep each other company, can’t we?”

      “Yes, we can.”

      “Dawson said he might come by one evening,” he added surprisingly. “He’s just back from Europe, some convention or other he said he couldn’t miss.”

      “At least he never believed the gossip about George and me,” she said wistfully.

      “Why, he knew his father too well,” he replied simply.

      “George was a wonderful man. No wonder you and he were friends for so long.”

      “I miss him. I miss your mother, too, God rest her soul. She was the most important person in my life, next to you.”

      “You’re the most important person in mine,” she agreed, smiling. “It’s good to be home!”

      “Still enjoy teaching?”

      “More than ever,” she told him warmly.

      “There’s some good schools here,” he remarked. “They’re always short of teachers. And two of them are expecting babies any day. They’ll have problems getting supply teachers in for that short little period.” He eyed her. “You wouldn’t consider…?”

      “I like Tucson,” she said firmly.

      “The hell you do,” he muttered. “It’s Powell, isn’t it? Damn fool, listening to that scatterbrained woman in the first place! Well, he paid for it. She made his life hell.”

      “Would you like some coffee?” she asked, changing the subject.

      “Oh, I suppose so. And some soup. There’s some canned that Mrs. Harper made for me.”

      “Does she still live next door?”

      “She does,” he murmured with a wicked smile, “and she’s a widow herself. No need to ask why she brought the soup, is there?”

      “I like Mrs. Harper,” she said with a grin. “She and Mother were good friends, and she’s like family already. Just in case you wondered what I thought,” she added.

      “It’s only been a year, girl,” he said, and his eyes were sad.

      “Mother loved you too much to want you to go through life alone,” she said. “She wouldn’t want you to grieve forever.”

      He shrugged. “I’ll grieve as long as I please.”

      “Suit yourself. I’ll change clothes and then I’ll see about the soup and coffee.”

      “How’s Barrie?” her father asked when Antonia came out of her bedroom dressed in jeans and a white sweatshirt with golden sequined bells and red ribbon on it.

      “She’s just fine. Spunky as ever.”

      “Why didn’t you bring her with you?”

      “Because she’s juggling four boyfriends,” she said, chuckling as she went about warming soup.

      “Dawson won’t wait forever.”

      She glanced at him. “Is that what you think, too? She won’t talk about him.”

      “He won’t talk about her, either.”

      “What’s this rumor about him and the widow Holton?”

      He sat down in a chair at the table with a painful breath. “The widow Holton is redheaded and vivacious and a man-killer,” he said. “She’s after Dawson. And Powell Long. And any other man with money and a passable face.”

      “I see.”

      “You

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