Wild Iris Ridge

The other woman looked thrilled. “That would be fantastic! I just had these really cute cards made up.” She reached into the funky fabric bag she carried and pulled out a slim black case. She extracted a business card and handed it over to Lucy. “My cell, business line and email are on there. Call me and we can work something out. Do you have a card we can exchange?”

She had about a jillion and three of them, but they wouldn’t do her any good anymore. “Not on me,” she answered, which wasn’t precisely a lie. “I’ll call you, though.”

“Great. I can’t wait.”

She waved goodbye to the women, left a bill on the counter to pay Dermot for her breakfast along with a healthy tip and then walked out into the town that would be her home for the foreseeable future, like it or not.

CHAPTER FOUR

“COME ON, HONEY. You can do it,” Brendan urged his daughter.

“No! Don’t let go, Daddy,” Faith begged. “Please don’t let go.”

Brendan sighed as he held on to the back of her bike seat, wishing he could enjoy the sweetly warm April evening that smelled of life, new growth, somebody barbecuing down the street.

Another spring, another effort to get Faith to ride her bike without the training wheels.

Two years ago, she had begged him to take off the training wheels on her bike as soon as the snow melted. He had promised he would before the new baby came—but before he could follow through on his promise, Jess and the baby were both gone.

None of them had felt much like riding bikes that spring. When he pulled them out of the garage after the snow melted a year ago, Faith had insisted she wasn’t ready to ride without the training wheels. He had pushed a little but not too hard. Jessie had only been gone a year and Faith seemed to need the comfort of the familiar.

But she would turn eight years old during the summer. The time had come for her to stop clinging so tightly to the familiar and venture into untried territory.

He worried about the tentativeness she had developed since Jess’s death. She never wanted to try anything new—roller-skating, Girl Scouts, sushi.

She was an insanely smart girl, but she was beginning to let her fears rule her.

All of them had been in grief counseling for months after Jess and their unborn baby died. Maybe they weren’t quite done in that department.

At some point, he had to fight back against the tyrannical hold Faith’s fears had over her. He figured forcing her to lose the training wheels was as good a place to start as any and had removed them a week earlier, much to her dismay.

“Hey, Dad! Look! Here I go!”

Carter, still a month away from six, rolled past on his two-wheeler like Lance freaking Armstrong—but without the steroid abuse.

Carter seemed on the other side of the spectrum from Faith, totally without fear. He had begged Brendan to take off his training wheels the previous fall and he had done it with a great deal of trepidation, certain a five-year-old didn’t have the balance or coordination yet. Training wheels existed for a reason, right?

At the same time, he had hoped maybe seeing Carter make the effort might spur Faith to try a little harder.

Instead, as she watched her brother master the bike in just an hour, Faith only seemed to cling tenaciously to her conviction that she wasn’t ready.

“You’re doing great, Car,” he called. “Keep going.”

“I loooove my bike,” Carter sang out at the top of his lungs in one of his spur-of-the-moment song compositions as he rode past. “I love love love my bike.”

He had to smile at the sheer exuberance Carter brought to everything he did. What would he have done the past two years without both of his kids?

Probably wandered into the wilderness and became a hermit or something, growing a four-foot-long beard and living off beef jerky.

“Riding bikes is awesome and cool. I want to ride my bike to school,” Carter sang.

Even Faith smiled at her little brother.

Brendan took that as an encouraging sign. “Okay, let’s try one more time.”

Her smile slid away. “I don’t want to. Please don’t make me, Daddy.”

“You can do it, Faith. You just have to believe in yourself,” he urged, feeling like the worst parent on earth for pushing her out of her comfort zone. On the other hand, wouldn’t catering to her unreasonable fears be more harmful in the long run?

“I don’t want to!” she protested.

“One more, that’s all. I promise. And then we can put the bikes away and go for a walk.”

“I want to ride a bike,” she said, with traces of her mother’s stubbornness—okay, and his, as well—in her voice. “I just want to ride a bike that still has training wheels. Why can’t you put them back on?”

If the kid spent as much time trying to focus on her balance as she did arguing about why she couldn’t, they would all be better off.

“One more time, Faith. Come on, kiddo. You’ve got this.”

She glared at him but apparently accepted that he wasn’t about to back down. With him holding on to the seat for balance, she started her wobbly way down the ride.

“Don’t let go,” she said. “Promise!”

He didn’t answer. Instead, when she seemed to have sufficient speed and had reduced the wobble, he enacted one of those difficult parental betrayals and released his hold on her.

She rode about six feet before she realized he wasn’t holding on anymore...and promptly fell over.

“Owwww,” she wailed, not quite crying but close to it. “You let go! You promised you wouldn’t let go!”

“I never promised I wouldn’t let go.”

“Yes, you did! You did!”

She wouldn’t listen to him in this state, and he wasn’t going to stand here arguing with her. Close to the end of his patience, he was about to tell her so when an unwelcome voice intruded.

“Wow, Faith! You’re riding a two-wheeler? That’s wonderful!”

Both of them turned around swiftly to find Lucy walking down the sidewalk toward them.

She looked lovely and bright and more casually dressed than he had seen her in a long time, in jeans and a plain green tailored cotton shirt that matched her eyes. With her hair pulled up into a loose hairstyle on top of her head, she looked pretty and sweet and far too young to have been the marketing director at a major software company until recently.

He was supposed to make arrangements with her to drop off a few things for Faith and Carter. He hadn’t precisely forgotten; he had just done his best to put it out of his head so he didn’t have to dwell on more thoughts of her that seemed to have intruded far too frequently since she returned to town.

“Aunt Lucy!” Faith exclaimed, her voice overflowing with joy.

Her father’s minor treachery forgotten, she jumped up from the toppled bike and raced to Lucy, throwing her arms around her waist with an exuberant delight he rarely saw in his quiet, serious oldest child.

Lucy closed her eyes as she returned Faith’s embrace with a soft expression on her features that brought a weird lump to his throat.

He and Lucy might not get along for a dozen different reasons, but he couldn’t deny that she loved his children.

“What are you doing here?” Faith burst out. “I didn’t even know you were coming! How long are you staying? Where are you staying? Will you be here for my baseball game next week?”

Lucy laughed at the barrage of questions hurled at her like a broken pitching machine spewing balls at the new batting cages in town.

“Whoa. Slow down. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you myself. I made a really quick decision to come back to Hope’s Crossing, and here I am. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell anybody. And I can’t tell you how long I’m staying but I think it will be at least a month.”

Faith’s eyes widened. “A month? Really?” she whispered in a reverent sort of voice, as if someone had just handed her all her dreams on a shiny platter. Which Lucy apparently had just done.

“Yes. I’ll be staying at Iris House. Just up the hill, right? I hope we have a chance to spend a lot of time together while I’m here.”

“We can! Oh, we can,” Faith said, at the same moment Carter came zooming past again on his bike.

Unlike his sister, Carter didn’t seem at all fazed to see his usually absent honorary aunt. He acted like it was no big deal to encounter her walking down the street.

“Lucy! Hey, Lucy! Look at me!”

“Wow, Carter! You’re doing great. Both of you riding without training wheels. That’s so terrific. It’s only a matter of time before you’ll both be driving.”

Faith giggled and grinned at Brendan, apparently forgetting for the moment that she was mad at him.

“I’m not really very good at riding a two-wheeler,” Faith confessed after a moment.

“It takes a lot of practice. I bet you’re terrific. Why don’t you show me?”

Brendan worried she might start up her litany of excuses again. Instead, after a wary look at Lucy, she picked her bike off the pavement and climbed on with a determined expression.

He moved forward to hold on to the seat again, but before he could reach it, Faith pushed one pedal down and then the other. The effort was wobbly and unsteady and he thought for sure she would fall but after a few more feet, something clicked. She caught the rhythm or found her balance or something. By the time she made it to the next driveway, she was actually riding.

Faith gave a half excited, half terrified shriek.

“You’re doing it, sweetheart,” he called.

“That’s fantastic! You’re amazing,” Lucy said. “See if you can make it to the corner and back.”

“Come on, Faith. We can go together!” Carter exclaimed, obviously excited to see his sister riding after all the hassles of working to make it happen.

They rode off together, with Faith gaining more confidence with each rotation of the wheel.

“You’re welcome,” Lucy said, as the children pedaled out of earshot.

He gave her a long look. “Am I?”

“How long has she been trying not to learn how to ride a two-wheeler?”

He made a face. “About two years now. How did you know?”

She shrugged, keeping a careful eye on the children. He tried to do that, too, but found his gaze straying back to her despite his best efforts. “I’ve been watching from the house for the past fifteen minutes. Nobody but Carter seemed to be having a good time.”

“Faith can be obstinate when she’s in a mood.”

“Poor thing,” she said with a dry look. “She must have inherited that trait from Jessie.”

The name seemed to shiver between them. Her best friend and his late wife.

“No doubt,” he murmured and quickly changed the subject. “How’s the house? Still smell like a campfire in there?”

She shook her head. “I found a couple of box fans in the cellar. I threw open all the windows on the ground floor and for the last two days I’ve been trying to blow all the air out. Now it smells like a Colorado April afternoon.”

“That should help. You’ll want to wash the curtains in that room, like I said, maybe have the upholstery on the furniture cleaned. Sometimes that smoke can cling for weeks, especially in textiles.”

“I’ll do that. Thank you.”

They lapsed into silence, both watching the children as they reached the corner. Brendan held his breath as Faith navigated the turn. She was a little shaky and he thought she would fall, but she set her leg down to help stabilize the bike and then picked up the rhythm again.

The kid was a natural. He had known she would be once she conquered her mental block and pushed past her apprehension. For that, at least, he owed Lucy.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you last night about coming over to bring the gifts you bought for the children,” he said on impulse. “The evening got away from me, as they tend to do, with homework and laundry and dinner and everything.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, her eyes filled with a sympathy he found as surprising as it was unwelcome. He didn’t want her feeling sorry for him. Yeah, being a single father was tough, but he had plenty of help from his family and good neighbors.

“Whenever you want to come over should be fine. Tomorrow after school would work. I’m not on the schedule at the station for a few more days.”

“Thanks. I would go get them now but I don’t want to stop the forward momentum here.”

The kids rode up to them just then. Faith even managed a credible job of staying balanced while she braked.

“Did you see that, Dad?” Faith’s sweetly serious little face glowed. “I rode all the way to the corner and back!”

“I watched the whole time. You were terrific. I knew you could do it. It was just a matter of practice.”

And a little bit of Lucy magic, he added to himself. It wasn’t a completely comfortable thought.

“Can we go for a bike ride to the park?”

He chuckled. “Two minutes ago, you couldn’t ride without your training wheels. Now you’re ready to go across town to the park?”

“It’s not across town. I meant the little park that’s just on the other side of Tulip Street.”

He had a hundred things to do that evening. Reports to file, bills to pay, dishes to wash. But he couldn’t discourage her from practicing this new skill he had fought so hard for her to attain.

“Sure. We can go to the park. Stay on the sidewalk and don’t cross the street until I get there.”

“Okay, Daddy.”

She beamed at him and rode off, still a little wobbly but really doing remarkably well, considering she had only actually been riding without the training wheels for about ten minutes.

He followed after her and had walked only a few steps when he realized Lucy was still standing where he had left her, in front of the Browns’ driveway.

He turned around, struck by how lovely she looked there in the long shadows of afternoon with the fading sunlight haloing her hair and burnishing her skin.

He didn’t want to notice that about Lucy or any woman. Not yet. He forced himself to push it out of his mind.

“You’re not coming with us?” he asked gruffly, gesturing after the kids.

She blinked a little at his tacit invitation then smiled. “Oh. Yes. I could use a walk this evening.”

He waited until she caught up with him, and they walked in silence for a few moments. The air was pleasantly cool. He always enjoyed this time of year, when the grass was beginning to green up again and the trees were bursting with buds.

“I had forgotten how pretty Hope’s Crossing is in the evening,” she said.

He had lived here most of his life, except the few years he was away on a scholarship playing college football and earning his degree and then the two short years he played pro football before a knee injury permanently sidelined him. To him, Hope’s Crossing was just...home. But on a spring night in April, he could see the appeal of the well-kept, charming houses, the tree-lined streets, the mountains that encircled the town.

He waved to old Mr. Henderson, driving past in his beat-up old Chevrolet pickup truck. “It’s a nice little town, especially for kids.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

They walked a little farther and he raised a hand in greeting to two more people driving past.

“You must know everybody in town,” she said.

“Not even close. We’ve got so many people moving in or building second homes in the area, it’s hard to keep track. I just happen to know those two. And that one, my neighbor, Mrs. Peabody.”

He waved at the longtime widow who used to teach him in Sunday school. He saw her shield her eyes with a hand as she tried to make out the identity of his companion and his stomach dropped.

He suddenly regretted asking Lucy to join him on this little excursion. Hope’s Crossing was a small town. People were bound to take notice when their favorite object of pity, that poor widower Brendan Caine, started walking around town with a woman new to Hope’s Crossing—or at least recently returned to town.

The last thing he needed were rumors starting up about him and Lucy. He didn’t want anybody deciding to put more into this than exactly what it was, a casual walk to the park with his kids.

In reality, they were two people who disliked each other, linked only by the woman they had both loved and by the two children who rode ahead of them.

He needed to keep reminding himself of that and not allow himself to be seduced by a lovely evening, an even lovelier woman and the quiet enjoyment of a little adult companionship, for a change.

* * *

A WEEK AGO, if somebody had told her she would be spending a beautiful April evening sitting at a park in Hope’s Crossing on a bench next to Brendan Caine, she would have laughed out loud at such a preposterous notion.

Life had the strangest way of throwing curveballs at a woman when she least expected it.

A week ago, she had been confident she had the world figured out—or at least her place in it. Now everything had changed, and she was left trying to find her way again.

Once again, she questioned her decision to return to Hope’s Crossing. It had seemed so right at the time, coming back to this place where she had always found peace and comfort with Annabelle.

But Annabelle was gone and nothing would be the same.

Maybe she should have stayed in Seattle. She had a condo there she had paid cash for a few years earlier. She could have lived there basically rent free while she sent out feelers for other jobs. With her contacts in the industry, it probably wouldn’t have taken her long to find something new. Being fired from her previous job didn’t exactly look that great on her résumé but maybe her track record before the disastrous software launch would speak for itself.

Instead of following logic and sense, she had gone with her gut, for once, and had come back to the only place that had ever felt close to home.

Now, sitting next to Brendan Caine, she wondered again if it had been a huge mistake. He didn’t want her here, that much was obvious—at the park or in Hope’s Crossing. She hadn’t missed his discomfort, just walking through town with her.

Too late to second-guess herself now. She was here now and just needed to make the best of things—and maybe that started with finding common ground with Brendan.

“I had a nice chat with your sister yesterday morning at the café,” she said.

“Did you?”

“She looked fantastic. And she told me she’s getting married to Spence Gregory. That must have been quite a shock for you and your brothers.”

He shrugged. “They seem happy together. Spence was always a good guy. He just lost his way for a while.”

Apparently, there was a lot of that going around.

“And I understand Dylan’s tying the knot, too, with Genevieve Beaumont,” she said. “Shock number two.”

“Yeah. That one’s a little harder to take in, but somehow they work together.”

“How is her family taking it?”

“You mean their little princess hooking up with a disfigured war veteran?” he asked, his voice cold.

“Your words. Not mine,” she answered in the same tone.

He studied her for a moment and some of the protective harshness seemed to ease in his handsome features. “Sorry. It’s a touchy subject. The mayor and Mrs. Beaumont weren’t very thrilled at first, especially since Dylan was unemployed for a while there. And of course, they didn’t hesitate to let their objections be known far and wide throughout the land.”

“I remember the Beaumonts. That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Gen stood up to them, which was a surprise. The way I hear it, she told them if they put her in a position to make her choose between her family or Dylan, she would choose him, every time.”

Lucy decided she was liking Genevieve Beaumont more and more. “How romantic.”

“Or something,” he murmured.

“You don’t think so?”

“It’s easy to make grand sweeping statements like that. Not so easy to live with the consequences of them.”

“But Genevieve must have stuck by her guns. They’re getting married, right?”

“Dylan had a long, tough talk with Gen’s parents. When he’s not being all gruff and cranky, he can be quite a charmer, apparently. I think he must get it from Pop.”

“Too bad that trait wasn’t handed down universally to all the Caine brothers.”

He snorted, a small, amused smile teasing the corner of his mouth. “Isn’t it, though?”

She felt inordinately pleased that she had brought a smile to his face, even such a tiny one.

“He’s also started a partnership with a fairly new contractor in town, Sam Delgado. From what I understand, they have more business than they know what to do with right now. And he’s still a regular volunteer at A Warrior’s Hope, the recreational therapy program Spence and Charlotte started for wounded veterans. A war hero, a volunteer, a thriving businessman. How could Laura and William possibly object to such a paragon for a son-in-law?”

“Not to mention he’s the man their daughter loves.”

“There is that.”

He started to say something else but Carter called out from the swings in an imperious tone.

“Daddy! Push me.”

Brendan sighed. “How did my children both get to be such bossy little things?”

She rose from the bench. “I’ve got this. Relax.”

“No. It’s fine.”

“I’d like to. Would it kill you to let me help with the kids for five seconds?”

So much for any amicable accords. He was back to glowering at her—but at least he sat back down on the bench and made a gesture for her to go ahead.

She moved behind Carter and gave him a hard, swift push that had him giggling in delight.

“Higher!” the little daredevil exclaimed. This one was going to give his father all kinds of trouble during his reckless teenage years, she expected.

“Sure thing. Except I’m going to blame you if my arms fall off.”

He giggled harder and swung his legs to help gain momentum.

“Faith says you’re staying for a month. Is that true?”

“That’s the plan, kiddo.”

“Yay! Then you can come to my birthday party. It’s next month. I’m going to be six.”

“Do you know,” she said, “I believe I heard a rumor somewhere that most five-year-old boys turn six on their next birthdays.”

He giggled. “Will you come?”

“I’ll have to see.”

She didn’t add that a lot could happen between now and next month. Given the tangled history between her and Brendan, she wasn’t entirely sure she would be welcome at his son’s birthday party in a month.

* * *

TWO EVENINGS LATER, Lucy juggled an umbrella in one hand, a bag from her favorite toy store in Seattle in the other and a box in both arms as she pressed Brendan’s doorbell with her elbow.

She had always loved his house. It was comfortable and homey, built of a warm, rust-colored brick in the Craftsman style, with a wide front porch and two dormer windows. Situated on a higher plot in town, it had lovely views down the hill into downtown Hope’s Crossing.

Jess’s favorite rocking chair had a few old cobwebs underneath it, as if nobody used it much anymore.

She didn’t have time to feel more than a sharp, familiar pang of loss over that before the door jerked open. Brendan stood on the other side, a cordless house phone cradled in the crook of his shoulder and neck and his fingers texting on a cell phone in his hand.

He appeared astonished to see her for all of two seconds before his features shifted into an expression of sheer gratitude. He grabbed the box out of her arms with one hand and practically yanked her inside with the other.

“I understand,” he said into the phone in a clear tone of dismissal. “If you can’t do it, you can’t do it. Thanks, anyway. Talk to you soon.”

He hung up and set the cordless receiver down on a cluttered table in the entryway at the same time he shoved the cell phone back in his pocket. “Lucy Drake, you are an answer to prayer.”

She couldn’t recall anyone ever saying that to her, especially not Brendan Caine. “I am?”