Chapter Thirty-One
W hen she saw Tucker on the steps of the inn, scanning the crowd, Emily winced inwardly because she had no doubts who he was looking for.
She wondered how mad he was. Then he vanished into the gathering, which was growing every minute, until she wondered where on earth they were parking all the cars.
She stood on the edge, somewhat apart from the main throng.
She didn’t like being hemmed in, so she made sure she had some room.
Because there surely wasn’t any in the middle of all this.
She’d never find him in this mess. Would that be a good thing, right now?
After she’d pretty much set him up for that talk with Kane?
She sucked in a deep breath. No point in trying to dodge him. They’d have it out sooner or later, and better here with a crowd gathered to keep it civil.
“Lobo.” The dog looked up at her, alert and ready. “Tucker,” she said.
The dog immediately started searching, lifting his nose into what had to be a chaotic gathering of various human scents. The canine brain and its ability to sort that much out and zero in never ceased to amaze her.
“Find,” she ordered.
She didn’t have to add anything else, because the dog knew what to do from there.
He darted into the crowd as if he already knew where he was headed.
And apparently he did. In less time than it would have taken her to get fifty feet in this shoulder-to-shoulder swarm—with his advantage of being a dog, people instinctively gave room—he was headed back, Tucker at his furry heels.
Following the dog, she noticed, without hesitation.
When they arrived, Lobo sat looking up at her proudly. She held out the tennis ball the dog loved to carry around, and he took it with obvious delight. “That’s my good boy,” she said lovingly.
“Was that for him, or me?”
Her gaze shot to Tucker’s face. “For both, as long as both want it.”
Well, that took more nerve than anything has in a while…
“First,” he said, holding her gaze steadily, “I need to know what the point of that was.”
She didn’t pretend not to understand. She had the feeling that would be a very wrong thing to do. But she wasn’t sure how to explain, and it took her long enough searching for a way, that he spoke again, now with a bit of an edge in his voice.
“What was that for? Was that a ‘You think you’ve got it bad’ moment? Is that what you wanted me to understand, that other people have been hurt worse, other people in the same situation have lost people in worse ways? You think I don’t know that?”
“Tucker, no!” That thought had never entered her mind, and she hastened to explain.
“That’s not it at all. I wanted you to know that here you’re surrounded by people who understand, from all sides.
Kane, his wife Lark, Lucas…and Scott Parrish, Sage’s husband.
He was conceived strictly as an organ donor for his older brother, and—”
She stopped as he held up a hand. “I get it. Really, I do.”
“Please don’t think I was…trying to teach you a lesson or something idiotic like that. I just wanted you to know they’re here. And that they understand what it’s like to go through crap like you did.”
For a long moment he just looked at her. Then, his head tilted slightly, he asked, “But you don’t?”
“No,” she said, feeling she owed him the honesty. “I was one of the lucky ones. I have wonderful, sane parents who love me. I had, teen angst aside, a great life growing up, and I’m doing what I love today. You don’t get much luckier than that, in my view.”
He turned slightly and leaned back against the solid trunk of the big oak tree she’d been using to shelter a bit from the crowd. He tilted his head back then, to rest against the bark. She wasn’t sure what it was, but something about his expression impelled her to ask.
“When you were hurt, was…was your mother there for you?”
He let out a sour snort of laughter. “Oh, she was there. It was a hospital, and there were drugs, after all. After she got caught stealing twice they banned her.”
She felt a burning, acid sensation rising in her throat. Before she could fight it down enough to speak, he went on.
“My dad did everything for her. It was part of who he was—a caretaker. When he was killed, she couldn’t survive on her own. She had an emotional pain threshold of zero.”
“And she expected you to step up and take his place? To take care of her, instead of the other way around, as it should have been?”
“Pretty much.”
“Did you try?”
“In the beginning. When I first started winning, and she promised to get straight. I paid for therapy, for different programs, doctors. But she just flunked out and then spent any cash I gave her doing the same old, same old, so I quit.”
“Good for you.”
He turned his head to look at her then. “No ‘She’s your mother, you owe her’?”
“All you owe her is your pity,” she said.
“What if it was your mother?”
“It would never be, but even if it happened now, she’s seen to me my whole life, so has earned help if she needs it. Sounds like your mother has earned only your contempt.”
“I used to hate her. Finally decided it took too much energy.”
“Good for you again.”
A round of applause from the other side of the tree made them both turn to look. Frank Buckley had stepped out on stage.
“You’re not here to see me,” he said into the microphone with a grin, “so I’m not going to say anything except that I’m proud and happy to introduce our former handyman, who some of you may remember made even shoveling manure a tuneful experience.
I do miss hearing him singing while he worked, almost as much as the extra tips we got from guests who enjoyed the music long before he became a famous name. ”
He got a burst of laughter for that. Then he cut to the chase.
“We thank all you folks for coming. Now give our boy Kane the kind of welcome he deserves!”
A roar went up from the crowd as Kane Highwater’s hometown welcomed him back to where it had all begun.
“I just want you to know,” he said into the mic as Frank turned to go, “that all those tips he mentioned? He gave ’em to me. Because that’s who Frank Buckley is.”
The older man waved it off as he left the stage, but he was grinning.
These were simple shows, just the man and a guitar—although he did have a couple, one electric and one acoustic—and that voice. And after the first song, a rather rowdy, “let’s get this rolling” kind of opening that fired up the audience even more, Tucker gave her a rather amazed look.
“He sounds even better in person.”
She nodded, smiling happily. “Even without a band, and not an auto-tune in sight. He’s the real deal.”
Kane’s songs were matchless, from country rock to a bit more hometown Texas twang to some slow, soaring melodies, all with lyrics that made her chest tighten as they ran the gamut of every human emotion.
When she glanced at Tucker, she saw he was as entranced as she felt.
They stood for well over an hour, spellbound, until Kane shifted from the electric to acoustic.
“I remember when some on the crew would play his stuff,” Tucker said quietly. “It was always kind of in the background, down low because of the horses, and we were always scrambling, so I only heard bits and pieces. But I remember some of these songs, that got through even all that chaos.”
“That says a lot in itself,” Emily said. She started to say something else but stopped dead when she heard the opening to the next song. The gentle chords of the intro brought on that feeling again.
“Emily?” Tucker asked.
“This is my favorite,” she whispered, not to stay quiet but because it was the most volume she could muster.
As the song floated out, seeming to envelop the entire audience with that aching sort of longing that everyone had felt, sometime, Emily found herself watching Tucker instead of the singer.
She saw him tilt his head as the lyrics began to register, the story of longing and loss, of feeling so very alone in the world, of help nowhere to be found.
She saw the quick intake of breath as both words and voice dug deep into those hidden places.
And she knew it was reaching him as it had always reached her.
And when the last notes faded away, he met her gaze.
“Wow. He always rip your heart out like that?”
“That’s his way of saying to everybody who listens that you’re not alone, that he knows how it feels.”
“But…it gets to you.”
She smiled, just slightly. “He can even reach us lucky ones. And it helps me to help others, because when I don’t quite get their problem, I think of that song.”
And how Emily was that, to get that out of a song?
He was glad Kane started the show-ender before he said something stupid.
But when he dedicated it to his beloved wife, Lark, “the woman who saved me, and brought me home, literally and in heart and mind,” then launched into the love song that had become his biggest hit, Tucker felt an ache inside he could no longer deny.
Any more than he could walk away from this woman by his side now without at least trying. Without finding out if they could build something out of what he could no longer deny was more real than anything he’d ever felt before.