Chapter Four
S he gazed at him out of those huge green eyes, and their less-than-romantic surroundings seemed to fade. He completely forgot they were standing in the back of a hot, dusty tractor trailer, forgot the boxes of canned goods on the loading dock, forgot everything but the soft, entirely appealing woman in front of him.
Without conscious thought, he took a step forward, his heart leaping in his chest like a bronco bursting through the gate, and he saw color climb her cheekbones, saw her lean toward him slightly, that sweetly upturned mouth parted...
“You folks about done? I’d like to get a move on.”
Christa whirled around at the trucker’s impatient drawl, then she jerked away from Jace as if he had dumped a whole hand truck full of boxes on her toes.
“Y-yes. We’re done. This is the last load. I... I’m sorry it took us so long. The forklift should be fixed next time.”
Jace saw her hands tremble a little as she pushed the last load off the truck before he could make his brain work enough to insist on taking it from her. She didn’t so much as look at him while she signed for the delivery and saw the driver on his way.
When the truck pulled out of the loading area, she finally turned to Jace, though she focused somewhere over his right shoulder. “Thank you for your help. My stocker can organize all this in the morning.”
“You’re welcome. I’m glad I was here to help.”
She hesitated for a moment, then sighed and finally met his gaze. “As for the other, for what almost happened back there... I won’t deny some foolish part of me is...flattered. But I have to be blunt with you. I don’t have the time or the energy for a flirtation right now, if that’s what you’re after.”
“And if it’s not?”
More color flooded her cheeks, something else he found intriguing about her. He didn’t remember the last time he’d met a woman who could still blush.
“Then I’m mortified for misreading the signs and I’ll just look around for a convenient hole to disappear into while you go pay for your shopping cart full of junk food.”
He laughed and with deceptive casualness he reached a thumb out and brushed away a smudge of dirt on the plane of her cheekbone she must have picked up while they were unloading the boxes.
She trembled slightly but didn’t jerk away. All too quickly the smudge was gone and he had no more excuse to touch her. He forced himself to drop his hand back to his side.
He was suddenly not at all convinced a harmless flirtation was what he had in mind when it came to Christa Sullivan.
The prospect should have sent him rushing right out of her little grocery store. Hadn’t he spent the better part of his adult life trying to avoid anything deeper than that?
He knew he should have been panicking right about now. Instead he felt the same wild emotions he used to experience on the circuit as he waited in the chutes for the gates to swing wide—a jumbled mix of exhilaration, anticipation and uncertainty.
“You didn’t misread any signs,” he finally said. “I’m attracted to you, Christa. More attracted than I’ve been to anyone in longer than I can remember.”
Something flickered in her eyes, something hot and intense, before she looked away from him. “Then what I said before still stands. I might...return that attraction. But I don’t have time right now for a flirtation or a fling or anything. My life is in crisis. Hope takes every single bit of energy I have, and that’s the way it has to be.”
Hope.
Damn it. How had he forgotten Hope so quickly?
Christa had responsibilities and pressures he couldn’t even begin to imagine. As much as he might want to argue that she ought to at least give things a chance to see what might happen between them, he recognized the impossibility of that.
He had no business coming in and stirring things up for her. It was just one more selfish, irresponsible act in a long string of them.
Hank was absolutely right. If Jace had, indeed, been given a second chance at life after being trapped in that hotel fire that killed two dozen people—and should have killed him—maybe it was time he stopped feeling sorry for himself and started doing something worthwhile to prove Somebody hadn’t made a mistake in saving his sorry hide.
And maybe he needed to start by not pursuing Christa Sullivan just because he wanted her, as though he was some kind of greedy kid in a toy store with a fistful of dollars.
“I have to get back to work,” she said abruptly. “Thanks again for your help. There’s an employee restroom back there if you need to wash up. Michelle can ring you up out front.”
“All right. Thanks.”
“Enjoy your mac and cheese.”
“I’ll do that,” he answered, though what had seemed so enticing a few hours earlier now seemed like the rest of his life, without much redeeming value at all.
Christa did her absolute best to focus on invoices when she returned to her office, but Jace McCandless proved more of a distraction than she wanted to admit.
The darn glass of her office and the panoramic view it allowed into the grocery store allowed her to watch him undetected as he returned to his cart.
She watched as he selected a gallon of milk, some bananas and a small quart of gourmet ice cream of a flavor she couldn’t quite determine from her viewpoint.
The store had become more busy while she had been unloading the truck with Jace. She saw him stop and speak to a few customers—women, mostly, though even from here she could sense a restlessness in him and guessed he was anxious to leave Sully’s.
Could she blame him?
She winced when she remembered the awkwardness of their last interaction. The most gorgeous man she’d ever seen in real life had almost kissed her, had told her he found her attractive, and she had jumped into full-blown panic.
She could have at least let herself have a little taste, just so she could remember in her old age that she had once kissed a man like Jace McCandless.
What was his story, anyway?
While they had been unloading that truck, he had talked and joked with her, but she hadn’t missed the shadows he hadn’t quite managed to hide. Those shadows were none of her business. He was none of her business. The orbits of their respective lives had briefly bumped up against each other, but it was just a random fluke and certainly wouldn’t happen again. She wouldn’t let it happen.
Anyway, he’d purchased the Silver Spur ranch near Junemarie and Hank more than a year ago, and as far as she knew, this was the first time he had spent any significant amount of time there.
No doubt he would be leaving Sage Flats soon and probably wouldn’t be back anytime in the near future.
She knew darn well that prospect shouldn’t depress her so much.
The next two days were too hectic for Christa to give Jace McCandless much thought at all. Hope had appointments with her neurologist and her rehab specialist an hour away at the children’s hospital in Salt Lake City.
Both doctors seemed heartened by her progress—and both urged Christa to continue with the equine therapy.
“I think it’s a great idea,” the rehab physician said. “It can only help with her tone and with muscle memory. She loved to ride before the accident. Putting her back up on a horse has to help her body remember how it used to move, which can only help rewire those neural pathways.”
Even more beneficial to her than the stretching and physical movement, Dr. Kolford explained, was the emotional lift Hope received from being around the horses and reconnecting to what had been an important part of her life preaccident.
Christa knew all that. In her heart she had seen her daughter’s improvement after even just one session and her excitement to try it again. That didn’t do much to ease her apprehension or her continuing worry about trying to afford it.
And now she had Jace McCandless to add into the mix. She could only hope he would follow his usual pattern and leave town soon so she wouldn’t have to risk encountering him again at Hope’s therapy sessions.
The next day, one of the three checkers at the store called in sick and the other two had commitments they couldn’t escape, so Christa had to fill in at the cash register most of the day. Two days away from her regular responsibilities at the store left a serious backlog in her workload.
She tried to call home to let her mother know she was running late, but Ellen didn’t answer. She left a message on the answering machine, then tried her mother’s cell phone and again received no answer.
She set the phone receiver down, fighting down her instinctive unease. Ellen would call her if something was wrong.
They had probably just gone for a walk or something. Sunshine poured through the front window of Sully’s, and it looked like a lovely spring day. Hope loved to be out basking in the fresh air.
Christa did, too, come to that. She had a sudden wild urge to take one of her father’s two Arabians for a good, hard run after work to shake off the cobwebs—to feel the soft breeze against her skin and the leather reins in her hands and the strength and beauty beneath her.
How long had it been since she had indulged in a few selfish moments for herself? Between work and Hope, she had little time for any of her old pastimes.
Maybe she needed to make time. The rehab physician had taken her aside after Hope’s appointment to ask how Christa was doing. Dr. Kolford had urged her to take care of herself first or she would have no reserves left to care for her daughter.
It was good advice in the abstract. But the reality of five months had taught her there was always one more thing she needed to do for her child—one more exercise to get in before bedtime, one more prescription to track down, one more battle to fight with the insurance company.
She sighed and set her paperwork aside. Though she still had much to do, most of it could wait until the next day. Right now Christa needed to be home and get to all those one-more things.
When she neared her mother’s home, she slowed her SUV at the unfamiliar shiny silver pickup in the driveway.
That wasn’t so unusual to find a vehicle she didn’t recognize at the house. Between the medical case workers and the therapists and tutors at school, Hope had a wide circle of caregivers and many of them made home visits.
Perhaps that was the reason Ellen hadn’t answered either the home phone or her cell, because she’d been occupied with a visitor.
Christa opened the door, ready to smile and be polite, but inside the house only echoing silence greeted her.
“Mom? Hope?”
No one answered, and she walked from room to room on the main floor and found no sign of them. Since Ellen couldn’t take Hope up the stairs, she didn’t bother checking there.
This was odd. She could believe Ellen might have pushed Hope outside to enjoy an afternoon walk, but that certainly didn’t explain the unfamiliar pickup truck.
Where could they be? she worried. She knew her mother would have called her if Hope had had a bad seizure or something. But what if Ellen wasn’t able to use the phone?
She walked outside to look around and thought she just heard the murmur of voices on the wind. Odd. It sounded as if the voices were coming from the horse pasture where her father’s beloved pair of Arabians resided.
What on earth would they be doing there? The path between the house and the horse pasture was uneven gravel, far too difficult terrain for Ellen to easily maneuver Hope’s wheelchair.
But when she listened, she could distinctly hear voices. Drat her mother. She pushed herself too hard. Even if Hope had begged her grandmother to take her there—which she probably had—Ellen shouldn’t have given in.
Christa followed the path, thinking how many times she had walked this same route when she was a girl. She had been just as horse-mad as Hope—which might explain why she’d run off with the first hunky cowboy to come her way.
The evening was warm for April and lovely with spring. Daffodils and tulips swayed in the breeze along the fence line, and the trees in her mother’s small fruit orchard burst with color, heavy with lush blossoms.
This was home. In those rough early days on her own in Texas, she had dreamed of the sweetness of a Utah spring, of lilac bushes and cool mornings and their neighbors’ new lambs leaping through the grass.
She remembered Jace McCandless telling her she didn’t quite fit here and she knew in this moment she could have offered him a powerful counterargument. Sometimes she wondered if she had ever truly belonged anywhere else.
Following the sound of voices, she rounded the corner of the barn, then stopped abruptly, her instant astonishment quickly giving way to a slow bubble of anger.
She should have known a man like Jace McCandless wouldn’t take no for an answer. She had asked him to leave her alone. So what was he doing there? He stood by the corral with Ellen and Hope, looking impossibly gorgeous as he supported Hope, who leaned against the fence railing and fed apples to the horses.
“Hi, Mom,” Hope chirped, sounding so much like her old self that Christa blinked and had to fight back tears.
“Hi,” she answered.
“Shiloh remembers me.”
“I’ll bet she does.”
With some measure of defiance, she leaned in and kissed her daughter, doing her best to ignore Jace just inches away from the two of them. Darn him anyway for coming around, for making her so painfully aware of the emptiness of her life.
“How did you get down here with that bumpy pathway?”
“Jace.” Hope beamed at him.
Of course. Who else?
“We were taking a little walk earlier down the street when Jace happened to drive past,” Ellen offered with a smile that seemed just as smitten as her granddaughter’s. “He was kind enough to stop and say hello. And before you know it we were inviting him home with us for pie and coffee. We’ve spent a lovely afternoon together.”
“Is that right?” she murmured.
“Oh, yes,” Ellen answered, apparently oblivious to the frustration seething under Christa’s skin.
“I’m sure you don’t mind,” her mother went on blithely, “but I’ve invited him to have dinner with us.”
So much for any ideas she might have briefly entertained on the short drive home about spending a quiet evening at home with her mother and daughter. Any pleasure she had found in the lovely spring evening seemed to float away on the breeze.
Her mouth tightened. What was his game? She had quite firmly rejected him the other day. Given that, why on earth would any man still want to hang around with her and her sixty-year-old mother and her brain-injured teenager?
She wanted to tell him to go back to his starlets and his sultry country music stars and leave her and her little family alone. But of course she couldn’t. This was her mother’s house, and Ellen could invite anyone she darn well pleased to dinner.
“Lovely,” Christa murmured instead.
He sent her a swift look as he helped Hope back into her wheelchair, and she could swear she saw him wink, as if he knew exactly the dire thoughts racing through her mind.
She was angry.
All through Ellen’s mouthwatering pot roast and creamy mashed potatoes, she concealed it. She was polite to him as she passed the peas or another roll and she even smiled a few times, usually at her daughter but sometimes at Ellen and even once at something he said.
She was cordial and good-humored, but underneath it he sensed the slow burn of her temper, just waiting to flare.
She said nothing through the delectable dessert Ellen produced—a crunchy, golden-crusted peach cobbler that would have brought a lesser man to tears, served with vanilla ice cream.
He finished every scrap on his plate and would have licked it clean if his grandmother hadn’t raised him better. Christa, on the other hand, barely touched hers.
When they all finished, she rose from the table and started clearing away dishes.
“I can get these,” Ellen said. “Just relax. You’ve been working at the store all day.”
“And you’ve been working here all day, which is every bit as hard. You’re the one who needs a rest.”
“You both rest. I’ll clean up,” Hope interjected with her labored speech before the argument could turn heated.
Both women smiled and Christa hugged her daughter’s shoulders. Jace swallowed a lump in his throat at the obvious affection between the three of them.
“Why don’t we all do it?” he suggested. “Junemarie used to say something about many hands making light work.”
“Good idea,” Ellen said.
The four of them quickly cleared the dishes away and loaded them into the dishwasher.
When they finished, Christa wiped her hands on a dish towel. “I need to go feed the horses,” she said.
“Oh, we should have taken care of that when we were down there,” Ellen said, apology in her eyes. “You’ve been doing the chore for so long I don’t even think about it anymore.”
“It’s no big deal. It won’t take me long.”
Jace stood. “I’ll come with you.”
A small, tight smile crossed her lovely features. “That’s really not necessary.”
“Many hands make light work, remember?”
She studied him for a long moment, then she shrugged. “Fine. Come on, then.”
She had been simmering all through dinner, and he figured it was almost time for her temper to blow. As he was the cause of it, the least he could do was step up and take the sharp edge of her tongue like a man—especially since he knew damn well he deserved it.
They walked in silence until they reached the small, well-kept horse pasture. The Arabians were beautiful, high-spirited animals and they sniffed the air when Christa and Jace approached.
She murmured in a low voice to both of them, and without hesitation both horses trotted to the fence and nudged at her with affection, much as they had done earlier with Hope.
“They’re magnificent animals,” he said.
“They are. My father loved them. He rode every day of his life, up until he dropped dead of a heart attack. Hope loved to ride them, too, before the accident.”
“I guess they’re a little high-strung for her now.”
She sighed. “You could say that. They’re both gentle as can be most of the time. But I would worry about those times they tend to get a little overexcited.”
She went about the business of feeding and watering them—something he should have handled for her earlier if he’d been thinking.
He helped as much as she would let him. Finally he decided he might as well jump feetfirst into the fire rather than stand here being scorched by excruciating inches.
“Go ahead. Spill it.”
“Spill what?”
“The ire you’re itching to pour on me. I know you’re not happy I stayed for dinner.”
“You’re a guest of my mother’s,” she said promptly. “This is her home and she’s certainly free to invite anyone she wants for dinner. Beyond that, Hope is obviously thrilled to spend even a minute with you, so I have no right to be annoyed.”
“But you are.”
She was quiet for a long moment, her face a pale, lovely blur in the gathering twilight. “Yes,” she finally said, her voice low. “This is...awkward for me.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen, if that helps at all. I really was just driving on my way back to the Silver Spur from the feed store and I happened to see Ellen and Hope. I stopped to say hello, and before I quite knew what happened I was pushing Hope’s wheelchair while we walked and Ellen and I were talking about the Busybees and they both sort of invited me to stay for dinner.”
“You could have said no,” Christa pointed out. “It would have been easier all the way around.”
“I could have,” he agreed. “But I didn’t want to.”
“Even after the...after the other day? I told you I wasn’t interested in anything with you. I haven’t changed my mind.”
Her words were firm enough, but he thought he heard a slender thread of uncertainty in her voice, just enough to make him wonder if she wasn’t as unaffected by him as she wanted him to think.
No. He was probably imagining things. Damn it.
“Lucky for me, my ego is healthy enough to survive a little rejection. It’s bigger than my horse, remember?”
“How can I forget?” she muttered.
He laughed, charmed by this lovely woman with more prickles than a whole field of burdock.
“Anyway, my accepting an invitation to dinner from your mother and daughter wasn’t about you. Or at least not completely about you.”
“What was it about?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I enjoyed the afternoon with your mother and Hope. More than any afternoon I’ve had in a long time. Ellen knows everything there is to know about Sage Flats and the people who live here. She’s full of funny stories about the mayor’s pigs and Betty Renfrew’s hair-color-gone-wrong and the time Tag Jensen was cornered by his prize bull and ended up stuck in a tree all afternoon.
“And Hope,” he went on. “She’s just...amazing.”
She was just about the most courageous person he’d ever met. He smiled, remembering how she had laughed at his jokes and even told some of her own. He was getting better at understanding her labored speech.
“Is it my imagination or is she using her hands better than she did before we went riding?”
Christa nodded. “We’ve been working on writing her name for a long time now, and she just hasn’t quite been able to master it until after we went riding. The day after equine therapy, she wrote it plain as can be—and she’s been doing it ever since.”
“Writing her name? That seems an odd skill to be affected by riding a horse. I wouldn’t think the two would go together.”
“Who knows? Maybe some hand-brain connection clicked in while she was holding the reins. I’m not going to question the mechanics of it, I’m only grateful for the result.”
“It’s an amazing thing Hank is doing with his retirement, isn’t it? If not for his granddaughter with Down syndrome, I’m sure he never would have come up with the idea to start the center. And now look what he’s accomplishing. It’s not every day a guy like me gets to be part of a miracle.”
Hank was changing lives, helping children, while Jace had spent the better part of two years wasting every single chance he’d been given with self-indulgence.
She was silent for a few moments, watching the horses enjoy their dinner. When she turned to him, her eyes were softer than they’d been when they left the house. “You’re a tough man to stay angry with. How does anyone do it?”
“Lots of practice?”
She laughed out loud, something he sensed she didn’t do nearly often enough these days, and a warm sense of accomplishment bubbled up inside him. Maybe his life wasn’t completely a waste if he could bring a little laughter into her world.
He wanted more, he suddenly realized as he watched her features relax. She was extraordinarily lovely in the dusky light, her features soft, subdued like a pastel watercolor.
He ached to touch that skin along her jawline, to trace a finger there and feel the softness, then learn the curves and hollows of her smile.
Her gaze collided with his and after a moment, her smile slid away, replaced by something else—wariness, awareness, hunger. He wasn’t quite sure.
He only knew he had to kiss her.