Chapter Twelve
Miles supposed he should be glad he’d gotten back home a few hours before the Santa Anas had kicked up and would have made the plane landing…interesting. The hot, dry winds turned November into summer heat wise, but added in a restless, itchy sort of feeling that made it hard to settle to any task.
Fortunately there were no wildfires in the region at the moment for the all too familiar winds to spread far and wide, destroying everything in their path and sending choking smoke over everything between the blaze and the ocean.
But that might well not last. One blown-over power pole with live wires is all it would take to set off one of the conflagrations so familiar to those who had lived here any amount of time.
To one who had grown up here, it was just something that happened. If you were lucky, it didn’t affect you directly other than blowing stuff around. Well, that and breathing in fire smoke, which was bad enough, but still lucky.
Because if you weren’t so lucky, one of those fires took everything from you.
He dropped the pen he’d been using onto his desk and stared at the forms on his computer screen.
A screen that seemed to be looking back at him in a nagging sort of way.
They needed this song for Eastside—they’d all agreed on that—but the virtual paperwork involved in getting the rights to use even a minute of the four-minute opus was exhausting. Or at least it felt that way right now.
He rubbed at his eyes, dry from those same winds that were rattling the windows of his office. Maybe he shouldn’t have stopped here right after landing. Maybe he should have gone straight home.
He grimaced at the word he’d used. Home.
Not referring to his apartment several stories above where he now sat, in the L.A.
high-rise that housed both him and his office.
Not that the place wasn’t nice, fairly spacious, and quite modern.
It was all that. It also looked out on nothing but concrete and steel and traffic.
Plus some other even less desirable elements of life in L.A. these days.
And it wasn’t what he thought of as home.
Come back soon, Uncle Miles.
Jeremy’s clearly sincere plea ran through his mind once more, along with the image of sweet Maverick giving him a goodbye swipe of his tongue along with some fierce tail-wagging.
With a heavy sigh he gave it up. Maybe he was just too jet-lagged to focus.
Too tired. But if he was so tired, why was it that the only thing he wanted to do was go right back down to his car and head for the beach house?
He only had to walk about twenty feet to the elevator, and he’d be at his front door in less than two minutes.
Problem was, that wasn’t the door he wanted to be at.
He ran through it in his head, because that was the way his mind worked.
Orderly, thorough, covering all the bases.
He had plenty of clothes at the beach house.
Food-wise plenty of staples, but nothing fresh.
Normally he’d raid the fridge here, but there wasn’t much to choose from there either.
Knowing he’d be heading out for the weekend for Jeremy’s party, he’d let it run down to empty drawers and shelves.
He’d make a delivery order. That part was easy.
Question was, delivered where? The parsimonious side of him—which survived despite the ridiculous costs of the business he was in—said order it for here, because at the beach the cost and expected tip would rise exponentially.
He was probably one of the few who would even think of that, but he’d learned the lesson early and it was deeply ingrained.
Although these days the business was changing so fast that some of those who never expected to have to pay attention to expenditures even in the millions were having to rethink their approach.
Finally deciding he should at least set foot inside his apartment here, he shut down the office computer.
He got to his feet, grabbed the carry-on bag he’d dropped just inside the door, locked up the office and headed out to the elevator.
He made a mental grocery list as he took the short ride to his floor.
He made the call for the grocery delivery as he walked down the hall to his front door and was done shortly after he was inside and had the door securely locked.
Jackson and Nic didn’t even lock their door.
Neither did her parents. It wasn’t necessary, they all said.
He didn’t know if it was because of the trek from the road to their homes, or because any fool who broke into a Texas ranch house was liable to find out how stupid he was the hard way.
And even if he survived the break-in and almost inevitable confrontation with an angry Texan, he’d then have one of Chief Shane Highwater’s crew to deal with, and Miles didn’t think that would end well for anyone who tried to rip off a Last Stand resident.
He’d been a little puzzled by how that worked, coming from a place where jurisdictions were laid out so strictly. And while the town of Last Stand was fairly small population wise, they made up for it in size. “Overcompensating after the fight,” Nic had joked.
She had also explained that if any part of your property was in Last Stand territory, Shane considered it his responsibility. “Not surprising,” she’d said, “given he’s the guy who gave up his life plans to come back and see to his family after his father was killed.”
She’d told him the rest of the Highwater story then, about how Shane’s youngest brother had blamed himself for that death, and the years he’d spent running. Years the remaining Highwater family had spent looking for him, never quitting the search.
His first reaction had been awe. His second had been that the story would make a great TV series.
That wasn’t the only idea that had struck him over this weekend.
He supposed he’d had to let go of the idea of resurrecting Stonewall before he could let in anything new.
But the Highwater story was just the first that started that side of his brain working.
That creative, visionary side Jackson called it.
The side that had him pacing his great room now, because he didn’t want to stop moving for fear he’d lose this stream of energy.
He thought of the people he’d met this weekend including, very unexpectedly, the woman who had created the online marketplace that was the hottest thing in Hollywood at the moment.
The World In a Gift, a name that was familiar even to him.
And that woman was now married to Keller Rafferty, the man who had taken in the orphaned cousin she had never known existed. That alone would make a heck of a story on screen.
He chuckled out loud, thinking that the story of Last Stand itself would make a great movie. Even more outnumbered than those at the Alamo, fighting to hold a saloon, not a mission, and surviving to tell the tale.
He was letting the images spin out in his head when his food delivery arrived. He grimaced, realizing he should have been thinking about what he might need to take with him instead of letting all those potential stories seize him.
You just didn’t want to think about Riley.
The words shot through his mind as he opened the door, and he was thankfully distracted by that before the idea could take hold.
Less than half an hour later he was in his car and headed west. It was only twenty-five miles as the seagull flies to his place on the beach, but given this was L.A.
the driving distance was much farther. He decided to forego the canyon drives and head straight down to SR1 now, and take the longer but more pleasant drive along the coast.
What he hadn’t thought was that the extra—and easier—drive, without the steep sides and constant curves of Topanga Canyon, left his brain too much freedom to wander. And it kept wanting to go back to Last Stand.
When he finally pulled into the single-car garage his beach shack—he’d decided he was going to call it that from now on—provided, and closed the door behind him, he let out a long, relieved breath he didn’t quite understand.
Was it the jet lag—which should be nothing, given the mere two-hour time difference—or simply that feeling of escape once he was out of L.A. proper?
He lugged what he’d brought inside. The garage opened into the kitchen, so he got the groceries put away first, then got his laptop out of its case and set it on the counter.
He stretched, gratefully, and felt himself finally beginning to relax.
And not for the first time considered just working from here, permanently.
The problem was, this place wasn’t nearly fancy enough to impress some of the people he had to deal with.
Swiffer, for example, had merely asked when he was going to tear down this dump and build something fit for human habitation.
He’d resisted saying that if it was fit for humans, it would mean Swiffer couldn’t visit at all. Barely.
He poured himself a small glass of his favorite Knobel whiskey, picked up the laptop, walked into the living room, and nearly collapsed on the couch.
The moment he had done that, he thought he should have turned on the gas fireplace, because it was chilly enough.
But he really didn’t want to get up again.
In the process of that thought he’d looked at that fireplace…which sent his gaze inevitably to the painting that hung above it.
He couldn’t describe the strange feeling that went through him as he looked at the springtime rendering of the scene, of that place he’d now actually been.
He’d stood right where the artist had stood, taking in the bench-like boulder on the left, and the rolling expanse of hills beyond it.
Even covered here as they were in that glorious carpet of bluebonnets, they were recognizable.
The solitary oak tree still stood to the right side, and in the distance he now knew that that little glint of light was a reflection off the Pedernales River.
The painting had always spoken to him. Had always caused a kind of longing he’d never really understood and had written off to some vague desire for more space than he had here.
Why, he didn’t know, but the feeling was there.
He’d gotten to wondering what living that kind of life would be like.
Wondering how ranch life had adapted over the years.
Wondering if it would survive indefinitely.
Capture it now.
Those were the words that had hit him the day the idea of a show that did just that appeared in his mind, fully formed, as if some part of his brain had been working on it for a long time. That part Jackson talked about, only half joking.
But this time, looking at the vista he’d now seen in reality, the longing escalated until it felt like more than just a sort of wistfulness.
He thought he could have stood that, but his mind kept adding the image of Riley sitting there in her favorite spot.
And that intensified it all into an ache he could actually physically feel.
He was, he thought, losing his mind.