girl slide down from the seat of the train, run around the back of it, and climb back into the seat from the opposite side.
“Watch me again!” The child repeated the whole process, then slid from the seat and ran to Sarah, throwing herself into her arms with the abandon and trust only a three-year-old can have. “Did you see me? Did you see?”
“I did, honey. That was great.” She hugged Katie and gave her a loud, exaggerated kiss. Katie giggled, squirming to the floor. She started toward the train, then paused, one finger in her mouth.
“Where did Daddy go?”
“Outside. He’ll be right back.”
“Oh. That’s okay.” Katie flailed one hand in a gesture Kelsey called her princess wave. She did look for all the world like a ruler granting sufferance to one of her many subjects, and that wasn’t too far from the truth. She sure ruled Sarah’s heart. “I love him anyway.”
“That’s good.” Sarah almost meant it. A kid needed a father. Nobody knew that better than her. Roy had been everything to her, filling a hole in her life she hadn’t even known existed until he came home with her mother one night and stayed. She’d never known her own father, but she’d felt the lack of one. Roy had taken that emptiness away, and then he’d gone again. She’d never wish that kind of loss on Katie.
“I love you, Aunt Sarah,” Katie said.
“I love you too, hon.” She remembered what Mike had said about Kelsey. “I love you all the way.”
She looked up to see Lane striding into the room, juggling two Styrofoam coffee cups and a handful of sugar packets and one-shot creamers.
“All the way?” He lifted his eyebrows in a teasing question. “I didn’t think you were that kind of girl.”
“I’m not.” She gave him a wry half smile. “I need to work on it.”
Chapter 33
They didn’t leave the hospital until well after midnight. Kelsey and Mike fell asleep in the backseat, snuggled together beside Katie’s car seat. They’d been holding hands, Kelsey’s head resting on Mike’s shoulder. It had actually made Sarah smile. Maybe her heart was thawing a little where Mike was concerned.
She and Lane made small talk on the way back to the ranch, mostly about Kelsey. Sarah filled him in on what the doctor had said. It wasn’t a stroke, just an especially severe migraine that had tightened up some capillaries. The doctor gave her migraine medication, much to Sarah’s satisfaction, and ordered her to take it. Lane actually seemed to care, which would have warmed her heart if she’d been able to forget about the horse. How had he ended up with Flash’s colt? Had he been the buyer, the person who put the last nail in the coffin of her family’s ruined life? She counted surreptitiously on her fingers. He was six years older than her, so that would have made him twenty-one when it all happened.
It could easily have been him.
He pulled the Malibu to a stop outside the Love Nest. She opened her door, then closed it again. She’d never been so emotionally exhausted, but there was no way she could sleep until she found out if Lane had bought Flash.
She didn’t know what she’d do with the information. She knew the buyer shouldn’t bear the blame for the loss of the ranch. But all her life, she’d nursed a burning resentment toward the person who had profited from her family’s misfortune.
She turned toward him, bending one leg and tucking it beneath her. There was no moon tonight, so she could barely see his face.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” she asked. “That bought Flash.”
“Yes.”
“You stole him. You know that, right?”
“I put up my hand. It’s not my fault nobody else did. I would have paid more if anyone else had bid.” He reached over and stroked her arm. “What happened to your family wasn’t my fault.”
She knew he was right. But blaming the shadowy buyer had always been easier than blaming herself. It had been up to her to help the family recover from the perfect storm of disaster that had struck them when they least expected it. And she had failed.
“If nobody had bid, I could have gotten him back,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “I could have worked with him more, settled him down, taken him to the rodeo a few times. We could have gotten triple that price for him. I just needed a little time to get over things.”