Some Bright Someday (Maple Valley #2) - Melissa Tagg Page 0,39
pants and a Cowboys tee. She hadn’t lived in Texas in almost twenty years, but she remained loyal to her home team. Doug, Jamar, and Kelvin would be there, too. Mariana was the only married member of the elite team, so she didn’t always join in the after-hours gatherings.
“Everyone misses you, by the way.”
Had she taken extra care to emphasize the everyone or was that just wishful thinking on his part? Surely after this many months of distance, the feelings she’d expressed last spring had dissipated some, right?
“Believe me, I thought I’d be back by now. But Flagg has me on an impossible mission at the moment.”
“Right. The kid from Boston.”
“Wow, you know where he’s from? That’s more than I’ve gotten out of him. You meet him or something?”
“No, but Flagg mentioned him.”
He grabbed his last pair of clean jeans from his open suitcase. Should he ask Jen about using her washer and dryer at some point? Or maybe he could bring a load over to Kit’s—like a college student lugging dirty laundry home.
Just another reminder that his life didn’t look anything like that of other thirty-three-year-olds. The closest thing he had to a landing spot was his own boxy apartment back in D.C. But it’d never felt as homey as his room at the B&B. It never beckoned him back the way Maple Valley did.
He put his phone on speaker and laid it on the sole piece of furniture in the room—a rickety end table with one leg superglued together. “I wish he’d talked to me a little more about him. I can’t get a word out of the guy. I thought I had a good idea for working together. Thought it might give us a chance to talk or connect or something, but now he’s AWOL.” He reached for a clean t-shirt and pulled it over his head.
“I guess you know a little about that, don’t you?”
Her harsh words stunned him. No, they flat-out pummeled him. Finding all the bruises that never faded and pressing down. Hard.
No one on the team ever brought up his desertion. They didn’t bring up the dishonorable discharge, the prison sentence, any of it.
Was Courtney really still that angry? Had he hurt her that much when he hadn’t kissed her back? What about what she’d said just a moment ago about the team missing him? Just forced politeness?
He picked his phone back up. “Court, I . . . I’m—”
“Don’t want to talk about it, Luke.”
“But don’t we have to at some point? I’m still a part of the team and I want to know we can still work together and—”
“Cowboys just got a first down. Now’s not the time. Why’d you call?”
“I don’t know. Wanted advice, I guess. Wanted to know if anyone else knows something I don’t about this Noah guy. Wanted to know why Flagg is doing this to me and—”
His train of thought completely derailed as his gaze hooked on the sight outside his bedroom window. Was that smoke curling from the back of the main house?
What the—? He squinted, peering through the near-dark of the evening. Definitely smoke.
He scoured the tiny room for his shoes.
“Luke?” Courtney’s muffled voice sounded from the phone.
He didn’t even bother ending the call, just tossed his phone on the bed, yanked on his shoes. He ran from the room and burst out of the cottage. Black tendrils curled from the kitchen’s back window and that distant beeping sound was probably the smoke detector.
He raced across the lawn and pushed his way in through the sunroom doors. “Jen?”
Cade’s screams wailed through the house. Lucas surged into the kitchen in mission mode—focus homing in on the scene in front of him. Cade pounding on his high-chair tray, Violet bouncing up and down on the bench at the breakfast nook, Colie unmoving and unhelpful across from her.
And Jenessa over by the oven, waving a hot pad over whatever it was in that glass pan in front of her, burnt to a black crisp. Not a fire. But smoke fogged around her and . . . were those tears tracking down her cheeks?
He snapped into action. Accept the mission. Identify the strategy. Long, determined strides propelled him to the island counter. He hefted himself up and reached the detector with ease. Complete the mission.
The moment the incessant beeping quieted, so did Cade’s cries. Lucas hopped down as sudden, blessed silence echoed in the room.
Until Violet’s tinny, timid question. “What happened to your arms?”