True Love at Silver Creek Ranch - By Emma Cane Page 0,5
died after falling asleep in bed with cigarettes a few years back, and he hadn’t experienced anywhere near the grief he now felt in worrying about her. He might have only seen her once or twice a year, but he’d written faithfully, and so had she. The packages she’d sent had been filled with his favorite books and food, enough to share with his buddies. He felt a spasm of pain at the memories. Some of those buddies were dead now. Good memories mingled with the bad, and he could still see Paul Ivanick cheerfully holding back Adam’s care package until he promised to share Grandma Palmer’s cookies.
Paul was dead now.
When Adam was discharged, it took everything in him not to run to his grandma like a little boy. But no one could make things right, not for him, or for the men who had died. The men, his Marine brothers, who were dead because of him. He didn’t want to imagine what his grandma would think about him if she knew the truth.
“Those old women still seem strong,” Brooke insisted. “Mrs. Ludlow may use a walker, and your grandma now a cane, but they have enough . . . well, gumption, to use their word, for ten women.”
He shrugged. “All I know is what I see.”
And then they stood there, two strangers who’d grown up in the same small town but never really knew each other.
“So what have you been up to?” Brooke asked, rocking on her heels again.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Nothing much.”
In a small town like Valentine Valley, everyone thought they deserved to know their neighbor’s business. Brooke wouldn’t think any different—hell, he remembered how she used to butt into his in high school, when they weren’t even friends. She’d been curious about his studies, a do-gooder who thought she could change the world.
She hadn’t seen the world and its cruelties, hadn’t left the safety of this town, or her family, as far as he knew. He’d seen the world—too much of it. There was nothing he could tell her—nothing he wanted to remember.
“Oo-kay then,” she said, drawing out the word.
He wondered if she felt as aware of the simmering tension between them and as uneasy as he did. He wouldn’t let himself feel like this, uncertain whether he even deserved a normal life.
“What am I thinking?” she suddenly burst out, digging her hand into her pocket and coming out with a cell phone. “I haven’t even called my dad.”
She turned her back and stared out the window, where the firemen were hosing down the smoldering ruins of her family barn. For just a moment, Adam remembered coming to the Silver Creek Ranch as a kid when his dad would do the occasional odd jobs for the Thalbergs. He’d seen the close, teasing relationships between Brooke and her brothers, the way their parents guided and nurtured them with love. Their life had seemed so different, so foreign to him.
And now Brooke would never be able to understand the life he’d been leading. So he turned and quietly walked out the door.
Chapter Two
Brooke stood beside the ruins of the old barn, arms crossed, her chin tucked down inside the wool lining of her coat. The firemen were gone, and she was alone, staring at the remains, which hissed and steamed, even as ice flowed down cooling wood beams like frozen waterfalls. A few blackened timbers rose out of the debris, fingers pointing up at the blue sky. Incongruous against one another, really, she thought, feeling almost distant with disbelief.
And then the parade of pickups came barreling down the road on the other side of the pasture. Black Angus cattle raised their heads to look, then dropped them again, searching for grass tufts free of snow. Their grunts and lowing were the sound track of Brooke’s life, always playing in the background. She could see Josh and her dad in one truck, Nate and his fiancée, Emily Murphy, in the other. Brooke smiled, relieved that Emily had come along, too. Something about her just . . . settled Nate. Nate had always been a genial workaholic, driven about the ranch, especially the business end of it, a man who helped everyone even when they thought they didn’t need it. That tendency had kept him away from long-term commitments until he met Emily. “Helping” her had become loving her, and though both Nate and Emily had resisted, they’d each decided that love was worth taking a risk.