LITMIR.BIZ

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and flew down the gravel road where his house loomed up before him, he was reminded of Ava. He’d had the house painted the color of her eyes—that soft, pale green. Lord, she had the kind of eyes a man could get lost in for days.

      Jared ground his teeth, staring up at the place. When she’d left him four years ago, part of him had died. But the other part had remained alive to work. He’d worked his backside off night and day and dawn to get her out of his mind. Then later, to keep her out.

      He’d created this place to look cheery and homey. And perhaps to his grandmother it was, but it sure wasn’t to him. It was as though he’d built this house as an ode to Ava—in hopes that she’d come back, come home to him some day. But he’d been a fool, and the house had become just a place to rest his head at night.

      He slammed on his brakes, skidding to a dust-cloud stop. He stared at the house, its white and Ava-green trim mocking him in the late afternoon sunlight. All he could think, see, was her. He cursed. All those years ago, Ben Thompson had made it clear that his daughters were off-limits to the ranch hands. Why the hell hadn’t he listened?

      Ben Thompson.

      If it were the last thing Jared did it would be to get his revenge on that man. And if rumors of a financially troubled ranch were true, that looked to be soon enough.

      “Are you going to get out of that truck?”

      Jared glanced up at the porch where his elderly grandmother, Muna, sat at a small table surrounded by the things she loved. Tea, books, herbs of every kind and her spirit cards. She was his mother’s mother and all he had left of a family. She was a true Cheyenne with salt and pepper braids stretching to her waist. She was thin, but far from frail. Eighty-four and sharp as a tack, she looked a bit wrinkled, a bit like a weathered apple—sweet but tart when she had a mind to be.

      He remembered the stories she would tell him when he was a child. She’d been the shaman of her tribe, the one the people would go to for answers about dreams, visions and the future. She was called a “Teller” by some and a “Seer” by others.

      Right now, Jared noticed, she was something else altogether. Apprehensive. She stood up and started to sweep the porch with long, swift stokes. “What happened in town, Jared?”

      Inside his truck—which was growing warmer by the moment—Jared scrubbed a hand over his face. He didn’t want to answer her question, so he chose a route more traveled: avoidance. “Why are you sweeping? We have a housekeeper.”

      “I didn’t ask for her.” It was her usual reply in her usual indignant tone.

      Jared shook his head. All he wanted was for his grandmother to live the rest of her days in comfort. She and his mother had struggled all their lives, worked at any job that was willing to pay them a fair wage, just to put food on the table. And when his mother had died, it had been Muna who’d taken care of him. He’d just turned eight and he was a hellcat looking for trouble. But Muna had set him right, fed him, read to him—forced him to look past the cutting remarks and see that even a poor mixed blood could be someone. She’d been in her seventies while they’d lived on the Thompson’s land and still found the energy to wash floors, cook meals and sweep porches.

      Now, in her eighties, all she had to do was sit back, relax and enjoy life. But that wasn’t her way.

      “Jared,” she called from the porch, her voice calm but laced with strength. “You better tell me what happened in town.”

      “I ran into an old…friend. Nothing to worry about.”

      She shook her head, unconvinced. “I felt something, but the cards were most secretive this morning. They didn’t tell me about this old friend.”

      “Even the spirits of your animals couldn’t have predicted this,” he called, not moving from his truck.

      She shrugged. “Maybe not. Or perhaps they wanted things revealed in their own time.”

      Four years was a helluva long time to wait for things to be revealed, Jared thought. Too long.

      His only contact with Ava in all that time had been one phone call shortly after she’d left. But he hadn’t wanted to hear her excuses—hadn’t wanted to hear how she’d chosen another man over him.

      He twisted the key in the ignition and gunned the engine. Those days—those weak feelings—were gone. He wasn’t going to let any more time pass. Something buried deep in his gut wouldn’t allow him to just walk away like she had four years ago, like he’d done in the bridal shop today. It would’ve been different if he’d never seen her again. But he had. She owed him an explanation and once he had it, he could walk away free. He could finally forget.

      “I’ll be back,” he called to Muna as he shoved the truck into Reverse. “I’ve got to see that old friend one last time.”

      Jared barely heard the two-word utterance from his grandmother that followed him on the breeze down the gravel driveway. But he sure felt it—like a bullet in the chest.

      “Ava Thompson.”

      Two

      In the dusky-blue guest bedroom of the modest house her sister rented, Ava stared out the window at her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Lily, who was laughing and playing in the backyard with the lively elderly woman from next door and her two granddaughters. The three little girls were side by side, playing in the green plastic box Rita had filled with sand the day after they’d gotten there.

      Ava felt her heart tug as she looked at her daughter. Lily loved the outdoors, loved to romp and play and make friends. But New York City wasn’t built to accommodate a little girl with wide open spaces and a truckload of animals on her mind. Nor was it the best place to make friends.

      In playgroup and out, her daughter had had a hard time of it. She was different, strong minded and passionate. Someday soon, those wonderful characteristics would have her wondering who her daddy was—and where he was.

      A fact which scared Ava, but she knew such a need was inevitable and that her daughter deserved to know the truth.

      Lily’s cheeks glowed with health and happiness as she played. Long auburn hair, almond-shaped eyes and a sweet face with an upturned nose and a sprinkling of freckles. In many ways she was a miniature version of her mother. But there was her father in her, too: dark-gray eyes that looked straight through to your soul, long legs and a fiery temper when she was frustrated.

      On a weary sigh, Ava turned away from the window and grabbed the phone book off the top of the little white shabby-chic dresser. She needed to find a different place to stay—somewhere where there wasn’t even the most remote possibility of Jared Redwolf stopping by.

      “Hey. What are you doing?”

      Ava glanced up to see her sister walk into the room, balancing a box of cookies under one arm and two glasses of milk in either hand. A still-shot flashed through her mind of a ten-year-old Rita bringing her cookies and milk on one of their mother’s antique trays. As they grew up, Rita never tired of attempting to raise Ava’s spirits when something went wrong, no matter if it was as minute as a put-down from their father, or as enormous as the horror in junior year when busty Tina White had flirted her way into the part of Laurie in their high school’s production of Oklahoma!

      What was especially amusing—and endearing—to Ava was that Rita still believed that cookies and milk were a cure-all for the blues.

      Where Rita was the dreamer, impulsive and romantic, Ava mused, smiling. She was the responsible one—practical and cautious. To their mother’s delight they were truly characters.

      Ava had always loved to hear the story about her and Rita’s names. Their mother, Olivia Thompson, had been a stand-in for actresses Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth during a brief stint in Hollywood. One summer, she met Ben Thompson at a convention in Las Vegas, fell head over heels in love with him and had left all the glamour and her friends behind. But for her mother, those days had never been never far away. While she’d dress

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