True Love at Silver Creek Ranch(16)

He’d found himself outside a lot over the past two days, whenever he needed to get away from sweetly chattering voices. The snow-covered mountains still loomed as majestically as ever, but they were familiar, his mountains, unlike the mountains of Afghanistan, rugged and barren in places, permeated with danger.

And then there was the Silver Creek Ranch. All he had to do to see it was stand on the back porch. The boardinghouse was part of the ranch property, so after a line of evergreens and aspens, he could see Thalberg cattle leisurely milling across snowy pastures, or huddling together for warmth when the late-autumn wind swept across the Roaring Fork Valley from Glenwood Springs to Aspen. He saw the occasional rider, too, but because of the distance, it was hard to know whether it was Brooke or not.

He found himself thinking about her too much, which surprised him. Since leaving the Marines, he hadn’t given much thought to women at all. Certainly he’d met them on the Gulf, where he’d been a longshoreman unloading cargo south of New Orleans. But it was as if he didn’t know what to do with one anymore. That had panicked him a couple months ago, so he had a one-night stand. All the parts worked, and he made sure she had a good time; he was just uninterested in more, so he didn’t try to date. He knew, during those months, it wouldn’t have been fair to burden a woman with his problems. His life had been work, TV, and the occasional evening out drinking with the men from the shipyard. And books, of course. He enjoyed a good mystery. Grandma offered to take him to the Open Book when he was ready.

Instead of beer-drinking buddies with sports conversation to help him forget, he had tea-drinking ladies and their committee discussions about preserving the town. He wasn’t very interested—Valentine had never really felt like home. Grandma would have loved to discuss that, too, but he shut down any conversation about his parents. They’d been self-centered and negligent; they weren’t worth thinking about.

But in idle moments, his thoughts returned to Brooke. She hadn’t been on his radar in high school, and, truth be told, he hadn’t thought about her in years. But ever since she’d raced with him into a burning building to save her horses, she’d lingered in his mind. Maybe his mind was trying to tell him he needed a woman, because hell, he’d gotten a hard-on the moment she’d put her hands on his face to clean his cut. She’d been leaning over him, and although she was dressed as a cowgirl, he’d been able to see the edge of her lacy blue bra, and he hadn’t stopped looking. So if thoughts of her plagued him, it was only what he deserved.

But he really needed something more to do. And when his grandma spread out her tarot cards in front of him late that afternoon, he decided it was time to head into town. He could have walked it—Valentine was only about eight blocks wide and long. But he felt a little more invisible in his pickup.

The preservation-fund committee must have been doing good work because everything looked so polished and clean. Though there was a little more than a week until Thanksgiving, Christmas decorations lined Main Street—banners hung from the light poles, red and green ribbons tied everywhere. Businesses had already turned on the twinkling lights in their windows as dusk approached, fake candles in the apartment windows above. Each evergreen had been transformed into a Christmas tree, with gleaming decorations peeking from beneath a dusting of snow. Adam knew it must help their tourism business. The area was packed with skiers looking for sightseeing and shopping opportunities when they weren’t on the slopes, and Valentine Valley was only a half hour’s drive from Aspen. But this wasn’t the part of town he’d come from.

He kept driving past the “historic downtown,” past the old homes and the bed-and-breakfasts until he reached the trailer park on the outskirts of town, near the highway. Rusted single-wides were mixed in with newer models, and some had Christmas lights, too, but it all felt . . . forced, as if they were pretending everything was fine this holiday. And maybe for them it was.

He reached the spot where his parents’ trailer had been, and there was nothing there, as if it were haunted. He imagined that beneath the layer of snow, the earth was still scorched. A gang of kids threw a football around nearby, slipping in the snow, laughing. Adam smiled because that used to be him. Other kids in Valentine were snowboarding today, but these probably couldn’t afford to. It had been difficult to be a kid in the Rockies who didn’t snowboard, another thing to set you apart.

But life was what you made of it, and Adam had used his childhood to motivate him to change himself. These kids would, too. And in some ways, Adam had been lucky. He’d had a horse to love and take care of. His father rode it when he was hired on as a temporary hand at the nearby ranches—including the Silver Creek. Adam’s job had been to look after old Star, feed him, exercise him. Being responsible for something other than himself had been satisfying though he hadn’t realized it at the time. His dad must have sold the animal, he mused. Surely, it had a better home now.