LITMIR.BIZ

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rested a hand briefly on his uncle’s shoulder. “You go on home,” he said. “Change your clothes before you come down with pneumonia or something. I’ll finish up here.”

      “Kim thought you might want to come over for supper tonight,” Davis ventured. He and Kim worried about him almost as much as they did Brody. “She’s making fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy—”

      Conner’s mouth watered, but the idea of cadging a meal from the people who’d raised him, though it was an offer he would have gladly accepted most times—especially when his favorite foods were being served—didn’t sit so well on that rainy night. “No, thanks,” he said.

      He wanted a hot shower, a fire in the wood-burning stove that dated back to homestead days, and something to eat, the quicker and easier to cook, the better.

      Those things, he could manage. It was the rest of what he wanted that always seemed just out of reach: a woman there to welcome him home at night, the way Kim welcomed Davis. Not that he’d mind if she had a career—that would probably make her more interesting—as long as she wanted a family eventually, as he did…

      “Conner?” Davis said.

      He realized he’d been woolgathering and blinked. “Yeah?”

      “You sure you don’t want to have supper with us?”

      “I’m sure,” Conner said, turning away from Davis, silently reminding himself that he had horses to feed. “Go on and get out of here.”

      Davis sighed, hesitated for a long moment and then left.

      Moments later, Conner heard his uncle’s truck start up out front. He went back to thinking about his nonexistent wife while he worked—and damn if she didn’t look a little like Tricia McCall.

      WINSTON SAT ON A WINDOWSILL in the kitchen, looking out at the rain. The wind howled around the corners of Natty’s old house, but the cat didn’t react; it took thunder and lightning to scare him.

      And there hadn’t been any since Tricia had arrived home, taken a quick shower to ease the chill in her bones and donned sweatpants and an old T-shirt of Hunter’s. Every light in the room was blazing, and she’d even turned on the small countertop TV—something she rarely did. That night, she felt a need for human voices, even if they did belong to newscasters.

      Tricia couldn’t help thinking about Valentino, alone at the office, and when she managed to turn off the flow of that guilt-inducing scenario, Conner Creed sneaked into her mind and wouldn’t leave.

      “I know what you’re thinking,” she told Winston, opening the oven door to peer in and check on her dinner, a frozen chicken potpie with enough fat grams for three days. “That I should be eating sensibly. But tonight, I want comfort food.”

      Winston made a small, snarly sound, and his tail bushed out. He pressed his face against the steamy glass of the window and repeated insistently, “Reowww—”

      Tricia frowned as she shut the oven door. And that was when she heard the scratching.

      Winston began to pace the wide windowsill like a jungle cat in a cage. His tail was huge now, and his hackles were up.

      Again, the scratching sound.

      Tricia went to the door, squinting as she approached, but there was no one on the other side of the glass oval.

      “What on earth—?” She opened the door and looked down.

      Valentino sat on the welcome mat, drenched, gazing hopefully up at her.

      “How did you get here?” Tricia asked, stepping back and, to her private relief, not expecting an answer.

      Valentino’s coat was muddy, and so were his paws. He walked delicately into Tricia’s kitchen, as though he were worried about intruding.

      Winston, to her surprise, didn’t leap on the poor dog with his claws bared, despite all that previous pacing and tail fluffing. He simply sat on his sleek haunches as Tricia closed the door and began grooming himself.

      Valentino plunked down in the middle of the floor, dripping and apologetic.

      Tricia’s throat tightened, and her eyes burned. Somehow, he’d gotten out of the office, and then found his way through town and straight to her door.

      She bent to pat his head. “I’ll be right back with a towel,” she told him. “In the meantime, don’t move a muscle.”

      CHAPTER FOUR

      WITHIN THREE SHORT DAYS, during which the rainstorms dwindled and finally passed, leaving the scrubbed-clean sky a polished, heartrending shade of blue, Valentino charmed his way into Tricia’s affections and even won Winston over.

      Of course she was still telling herself the Valentino arrangement was temporary that Saturday morning, and she wrote her festive mood off to her lifelong love of autumn and the fact that she would be meeting Sasha’s plane in a couple of hours. She’d been in regular contact with Hunter, though mostly by email, because he was so busy getting ready for a big show at a new gallery on Bainbridge Island. Also, it didn’t hurt that virtually every camping spot and RV space was booked for the following weekend—plus a big group had reserved the whole campground for a Sunday barbecue.

      The deposits had fattened Tricia’s bank account considerably, and thus it was with figurative change jingling in her jeans that Tricia loaded Valentino into the back of the Pathfinder a few minutes after 10:00 a.m. and set out for the Denver airport.

      She put on a Kenny Chesney CD as soon as she cleared the city limits—this was the only context in which Lonesome Bend, population 5,000, was ever referred to as a “city”—so she and Valentino could rock out during the drive.

      Kenny’s voice made her think of Conner Creed, though, and she switched it off after the third track, annoyed. Shouldn’t it be Hunter she had on her mind? Hunter she imagined herself dancing with slow and close to the jukebox in some cowboy bar? After all, she hadn’t seen Conner since their lunch date.

      Hunter, on the other hand, had invited her to join him on a cruise to Mexico the week between Christmas and New Year’s, going so far as to buy the tickets and forward them to her as an attachment to one of his brief, manic emails.

      Remembering that, she frowned. She was—thrilled. Who wouldn’t be? It was just that he hadn’t consulted her first, had just assumed she’d be willing to drop everything—or worse yet, that she didn’t have any holiday plans in the first place—meet him at LAX on Christmas night, and board the ship the next morning.

      She knew a sunny, weeklong respite from a Colorado winter would be welcome when the time came and, besides, all that merry-merry, jing-jing-jingling stuff always gave her a low-grade case of the blues. Sure, she had Natty to celebrate with, but the music and the decorations and the lights and the rest of it made her miss her dad so keenly that her throat closed up, achy-tight. Joe McCall had loved Christmas.

      To her mother, Laurel, December 25 was a nonevent at best and an orgy of capitalistic conspicuous consumption at worst. A skilled trauma nurse, too-busy-for-her-own-daughter Mom was always in the thick of some international disaster these days—floods in Pakistan, earthquakes in China, tsunamis in the Pacific, mudslides in South American countries whose names and borders changed with every political coup.

      Suffice it to say, Laurel and Tricia weren’t all that close, especially now that Tricia was a grown-up. To be fair, though, except for her parents’ quiet divorce when she was seven, and all the subsequent schlepping back and forth between Colorado and Washington state, her childhood had been a fairly secure one. Until Tricia started college, Laurel had stayed right there in Seattle, working at a major hospital, making the mortgage payments on their small condo without complaint, and showing up for most of her only child’s parent-teacher conferences, dance recitals and reluctant performances in school plays.

      If there had been a coolness, a certain distance in Laurel’s interactions

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