Beside the Rolling Waves (Raspberry Ridge #7)

Chapter 1

One

B ecky Peck opened a bleary eye and lifted one tentative hand out of the warm cocoon of her covers, slapping around on her almost freezing nightstand, trying to find her phone to shut off the alarm.

Finally, her groping fingers hit the snooze button, and she yanked her hand from the chilly air back underneath her cozy blankets.

She had at least seven on her bed. And she wore a set of long underwear, two T-shirts, a long-sleeve T-shirt, a sweatshirt, and a puffer vest on the top, plus three or four layers on the bottom, along with a thin pair of socks underneath two warm wool pairs.

Her toes were still cold.

That probably meant her blankets had shifted during the night, but instead of trying to fix the blankets, she just pulled herself into a ball and used one of her hands to try to warm up her toes while closing her eyes and enjoying a couple more minutes of blessed rest.

Her day was going to be busy from the time her feet hit the floor until she fell into bed tonight. And she really should get out of bed and get it started.

But she dreaded the cold.

Her small apartment above the horse stable where she kept her precious babies was heated, but she kept the heat down to the very lowest it would go, just warm enough to keep the water lines from freezing.

She couldn’t afford the heat bill, not with the feed bill she had, plus the rent for the stable, and she did try to buy food for herself with whatever was left.

She ought to have health insurance, but she couldn’t even think about that.

She wiggled around, trying to get the toes on her other foot where she could reach them. She moved so much, she knew she wasn’t going back to sleep. So she might as well get up.

Bracing herself for the cold, dreading it, and wishing, just once, she could turn the heat up as high as she wanted, she took a deep breath and then threw the covers off, throwing her feet out of bed and going quickly to the bathroom.

It didn’t take long at all to get dressed in her work clothes and pour a steaming hot cup of coffee.

She didn’t really like coffee, and she had never needed it to wake up, but the warmth was what she craved, and she’d gotten herself hooked on the caffeine in the process. Not that it mattered.

Sometimes she wondered if anything mattered.

She’d always wanted to be around horses, it was her dream, but…she was sinking further and further into debt, and she had absolutely nothing to show for it.

Last summer, she hadn’t made enough money on the carriage rides she gave tourists to even pay for the feed bill, let alone the farrier and vet bills, and the idea that she might eventually need another horse could cause her heart to stop for a couple of seconds.

It certainly wasn’t enough to support her.

She did that by cleaning houses. But she only had so much time that she wasn’t taking care of her horses, especially in the winter when ice needed to be broken, water hauled, snow scraped, and horses manually exercised, because she didn’t want to chance them slipping on ice in the pasture.

They were too expensive, too valuable, and she loved them too much for that.

A horse with a broken leg would have to be put down.

She wrapped her hands around her coffee mug, eyeing her gloves by the door. She already had her coat on and her boots as well. The last thing to do was put her gloves on, pull her hat down over her ears, and head outside into the Michigan winter.

At least she didn’t have to walk far to get to work, she thought to herself, not for the first time. She lived above the horse stable where her horses were stalled, so it smelled interesting in her apartment, but that didn’t bother her, and her commute to work was her favorite part of her job.

No. Her favorite part of her job was the horses.

Draining the last of her coffee, she set the mug down on the counter to deal with later, grabbed her gloves, stuck them on, and then walked out the door.

Immediately the scent of horses and fresh manure hit her, and she breathed deeply.

It smelled like home to her. Like safety and happiness and all the good things.

That’s part of the reason why she did what she did.

Because she loved it. She loved this. Stepping out into a new day, breathing deeply of the smells that made her heart soar, and knowing that she got to do what so many people just dreamed of.

Sure, she lived below the poverty level, at a level that most people could not even begin to think of surviving at, and common luxuries, like toilet paper, were closely rationed, but…she loved her life.

There was only one thing missing.

“Good morning, Jasper,” she said, walking down the stairs and petting the nose that stuck out of the stall.

Jasper was always up and waiting on her in the morning.

Sometimes Jethro, and the two mares, Velvet and Clementine, slept in a bit, but Jasper faced the day eagerly.

He was always the one who wanted out, wanted to run, wanted to enjoy each new day, like it was a gift.

He reminded her what a gift life really was.

Sometimes she needed that reminder more than others.

“I wish I was as unaffected by the cold as you are,” she said to Jasper as she scratched his wide forehead. Clydesdales were tall, a heavy draft breed. They were also extremely expensive, and that was part of what made her bills so high. She’d overextended herself buying all four of them.

She couldn’t ask her adoptive parents, who would have insisted on giving her money and not allowed her to pay them back.

Matt and Jubilee Landry from Strawberry Sands had loaned her the money, and she knew that if she went to them and said she couldn’t pay them back, they would be perfectly fine with it.

They could afford to lose the money anyway.

But there was something inside of her that absolutely would not allow her to not do what she said she was going to do.

And when she asked to borrow the money, she told him she would pay a certain amount every month until it was paid back with interest.

It wasn’t right to not keep her word. Because a man was only as good as his word. That went for women too.

She thought about someone who had not kept his word to her, and her heart broke a little, as it did every time she thought about Rodney.

But life went on, and she hadn’t heard from him for a long time. And she wasn’t going to worry about it. She was going to move on with her life.

She pushed her shoulders back and finished petting Jasper’s wide forehead before she grabbed the bucket out of the gelding’s stall, and another one out of Jethro’s stall, and took them to the water hydrant at the front of the barn.

Hopefully it wasn’t frozen this morning.

She saw the heat tape glowing and took that as a good sign.

Hooking the handle of the bucket over the back of the hydrant, she carefully turned it on so it didn’t blast with full force at the bottom of the bucket, soaking her face and coat.

She’d done that plenty of times and had done the rest of the morning chores with a frozen coat and frozen body.

Getting her face flushed with cold water first thing on a subzero-temperature day served to wake a person up, that was for sure.

But it also was exceptionally uncomfortable.

As the water filled the bucket, she grabbed her phone out.

Good morning, beautiful.

She smiled. It was Rick, her almost boyfriend.

She didn’t take her gloves off to message him back, just used her nose to pull up the emojis and sent him a smiley face.

Rick would know she was working and understand.

Shoving her phone back in her pocket, she shut the water off, switched the buckets, and carefully turned the water back on. Then, while the second bucket was filling, she carried Jasper’s bucket to him and opened the stall door, setting it down so he could drink his fill.

She’d go and fill it back up, and that time, she’d hook it into his stall.

The heat from the horse usually kept the water from freezing, but not always. It depended on the wind coming off of Lake Michigan and how low the temperatures dropped.

Grabbing a bucket from Velvet’s stall, she hurried back, knowing from doing it over and over again that if she hurried, she could get there just as the bucket got full.

She timed it perfectly, shut the water off, hooked Velvet’s bucket onto the water spout, turned it on, and hurried back to Jethro’s stall.

It took a good fifteen minutes to completely water the horses, and then it was time to feed them.

Once they were fed, she would muck out their stalls, and then she would work on taking them out and giving them some exercise.

It wasn’t strictly necessary, but she wanted them to be in good shape if she got a request for a carriage ride.

Which, now that Christmas was over, bookings had slowed down to a trickle.

Or maybe it had stopped altogether. She scrunched her nose up and tried to remember the last time she had a booking.

Last week? Two weeks ago?

She wasn’t even sure what day it was. Sometime toward the end of February.

“Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine. You were lost and gone forever, oh my darling Clementine.” She sang to her horse as she scooped poop out of the stall, dumping it into the wheelbarrow that waited in the aisle.

Her phone buzzed again, and she tried to figure out who in the world that could be.

Rick had said good morning to her, but he knew that she would be working, and he wouldn’t bother her unless there was a problem.

Was there a problem?

She stopped, leaned the manure fork against the wheelbarrow, and pulled her phone back out of her pants pocket.

There were two texts. Both from her sister, Rita. That was even more strange. Rita knew she didn’t have a data plan. She paid for data as she used it with her TracFone. They didn’t talk to each other unless it was strictly necessary.

Rick wasn’t quite so considerate, and she gave him a little bit of grace, because she figured that when a man liked a woman, he wanted to talk to that girl.

She really wasn’t sure how much Rick liked her, and they’d never said anything about being exclusive.

Their relationship was one of those ones where she was kind of in limbo all the time, but it suited her just fine, because it wasn’t like she was financially stable and ready for a serious boyfriend anyway.

He was. At least he should be. He had a good job, and he was at the point where he could support a wife and family.

She wasn’t quite sure he could support a wife with four Clydesdales and a family, but she kinda hoped he was.

A little slice of unease sat on that thought for a moment before she pushed it aside.

So life wasn’t turning out quite the way she wanted it to.

Or the way she thought it was going to. Or the way she had hoped.

She had to move on. She couldn’t wait around forever for someone who wasn’t going to keep his word and who’d ghosted her years ago.

Opening up Rita’s text with her nose, she blinked as she read the text, then read it again to be sure.

I need to talk to you.

The next text was just as mysterious.

Please. As soon as you can.

That was really weird.

She pulled a glove off with her teeth and held it in her mouth.

Should she finish doing the horses? Was this like an emergency where…

what? Her sister lived in a suburb of Chicago, and considering their upbringing, she’d done pretty well for herself.

She had an apartment and a job, and while she had just broken up with her boyfriend of six months, a six-month relationship wasn’t a terrible thing.

Considering that Rita hadn’t been raised in the best of conditions, it was pretty good that she was as stable as what she was.

She was more stable than Becky anyway.

But Becky had always had more pluck. More grit and determination. There weren’t a whole lot of people who could live the way she was living and even enjoy it and be happy about it.

At least that’s what she told herself anyway. Still, she decided that this was probably something that she ought to address immediately.

Knowing that she would get cold if she stopped working, she went into the small office, where she allowed herself the luxury of a space heater.

She turned it on, pulled her other glove off, and sat on the folding chair in front of the heater so as not to waste any of the glorious warmth coming from it.

She wouldn’t have it on for long, just long enough that her fingers wouldn’t freeze as she pulled her sister’s contact up and put her phone on speaker so she could put her gloves back on and turn the heater off.

“Becky. You didn’t have to call me that fast.”

“I sure did. You asked me to call you as soon as I could. You know that there isn’t too much that I would have been doing that I wouldn’t have dropped in order to talk to you right away. What’s going on?”

“I got my test results back.”