True Love at Silver Creek Ranch(5)

“I was at the boardinghouse and saw the smoke out the window.” If the trees hadn’t been winter-bare, he might not have seen it at all, which made him think uneasily of Brooke, battling the fire alone. “Where are your brothers? They might have come in handy if I hadn’t seen the fire. I assume they still work on the ranch?”

She nodded. “They’re at the hospital with my dad, visiting my mom. Did you remember she has MS?”

He shook his head. “I never knew.”

“She never talked about it much, so I’m not surprised. Most of the time, she only needs a cane, but she’s battling a flare-up that’s weakened her legs. The guys took their turn at the hospital today, while I rode fence. Guess I found more than I bargained for.” She eyed him with speculation. “So you’re back to visit your grandma.”

She put her hands in her back pockets and rocked once on her heels, as if she didn’t know what to do with herself. That stretched her shirt across her breasts, and he had to force himself to keep his gaze on her face.

“Grandma’s letters were off,” he admitted. “She seemed almost scattered.”

Brooke focused on him with a frown. “Scattered? Your grandma?”

“My instincts were right. I got here, and she was a lot more frail, and she’s using a cane now.”

“A cane? That’s new. And I see her often, so maybe I just didn’t notice she’d slowly been . . .” She trailed off.

“Declining?” He almost grumbled the words. Grandma Palmer was in her seventies, but some part of him thought she never changed. She’d been the one woman who could briefly get him away from his parents to sleep on sheets that didn’t smell of smoke, to eat meals that didn’t come from a drive-thru. He was never hungry at Grandma Palmer’s, whether for food or for love. There weren’t holidays or birthdays unless Grandma had them. All he’d been to his teenage parents was an unwanted kid, the result of a broken condom, and they blamed him for making so little of their lives. He saw that now, but at the time? He’d been relieved to enlist in the Marines and start his life over.

Now he and Grandma Palmer only had each other. His parents had died after falling asleep in bed with cigarettes a few years back, and he hadn’t experienced anywhere near the grief he now felt in worrying about her. He might have only seen her once or twice a year, but he’d written faithfully, and so had she. The packages she’d sent had been filled with his favorite books and food, enough to share with his buddies. He felt a spasm of pain at the memories. Some of those buddies were dead now. Good memories mingled with the bad, and he could still see Paul Ivanick cheerfully holding back Adam’s care package until he promised to share Grandma Palmer’s cookies.

Paul was dead now.

When Adam was discharged, it took everything in him not to run to his grandma like a little boy. But no one could make things right, not for him, or for the men who had died. The men, his Marine brothers, who were dead because of him. He didn’t want to imagine what his grandma would think about him if she knew the truth.

“Those old women still seem strong,” Brooke insisted. “Mrs. Ludlow may use a walker, and your grandma now a cane, but they have enough . . . well, gumption, to use their word, for ten women.”

He shrugged. “All I know is what I see.”

And then they stood there, two strangers who’d grown up in the same small town but never really knew each other.

“So what have you been up to?” Brooke asked, rocking on her heels again.

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Nothing much.”

In a small town like Valentine Valley, everyone thought they deserved to know their neighbor’s business. Brooke wouldn’t think any different—hell, he remembered how she used to butt into his in high school, when they weren’t even friends. She’d been curious about his studies, a do-gooder who thought she could change the world.

She hadn’t seen the world and its cruelties, hadn’t left the safety of this town, or her family, as far as he knew. He’d seen the world—too much of it. There was nothing he could tell her—nothing he wanted to remember.

“Oo-kay then,” she said, drawing out the word.

He wondered if she felt as aware of the simmering tension between them and as uneasy as he did. He wouldn’t let himself feel like this, uncertain whether he even deserved a normal life.

“What am I thinking?” she suddenly burst out, digging her hand into her pocket and coming out with a cell phone. “I haven’t even called my dad.”

She turned her back and stared out the window, where the firemen were hosing down the smoldering ruins of her family barn. For just a moment, Adam remembered coming to the Silver Creek Ranch as a kid when his dad would do the occasional odd jobs for the Thalbergs. He’d seen the close, teasing relationships between Brooke and her brothers, the way their parents guided and nurtured them with love. Their life had seemed so different, so foreign to him.