“Things will work out with Laurie. They always have before.”
“I hope you’re right, but something in my gut tells me this time is different. She’s never put quite so much distance between us before.”
“Uncle Jordan’s plane can cover a piddly little distance like that in no time.”
His expression brightened for the first time since his arrival. “So it can,” he murmured thoughtfully. “And it just so happens, I have a pilot’s license.”
“See there. There’s always hope.”
He walked out whistling, looking a whole lot happier than he had when he’d come in an hour before.
“His mood’s improved,” Cord noted. “You must have a magic touch.”
“Not really. Used to be I had a tendency to always look for the silver lining in all the clouds. For a while now I’d forgotten how.”
Cord grinned. “But it’s coming back to you.”
She gazed straight into his eyes and nodded. “Yes, lately it’s been coming back to me.”
Chapter Ten
Even though he’d told Harlan Adams he would put it behind him, the fight with Cody kept gnawing at Cord. He was silent through most of the evening with Sharon Lynn, pitching in to help her with dinner, sitting across the table from her, but unable to make himself say what was on his mind. She kept casting worried glances his way, but she didn’t try to pry.
“Did Lizzy come by today to draw the baby’s blood?” he asked eventually, just to fill the silence.
She gave a little nod, clearly no more eager to talk about that than he was to bring up the fight with her father. “How long will the typing take?” he asked, anyway.
“She should be calling any minute,” Sharon Lynn said with a nervous glance toward the phone. “She promised to check with the lab before she left the hospital.”
Knowing that only added to the strain already filling the air. The tension was thick enough to turn a sun-baked rattler jittery. They fell silent and stayed that way.
After dinner, with the baby already asleep, Cord knew it was time to either go or stay. And, if he stayed, he was going to have to get into the substance of his argument with Cody. Sharon Lynn had already heard just enough from her brother to deserve a complete explanation from him.
As she put the last dish away in the cupboard, she turned to face him. “We’ve been avoiding it all evening and it hasn’t worked. You might as well tell me exactly what happened out at White Pines today,” she said. “I’ve heard some from Harlan Patrick. I’m going to hear the rest eventually, anyway.”
He didn’t even bother trying to pretend that he misunderstood. “Just how much did Harlan Patrick tell you?”
“That Daddy’s afraid you might be after Kyle’s land,” she said bluntly. “Just so you know, I meant what I said earlier. I don’t believe it for a minute.”
Well, that was certainly to the point, Cord thought ruefully. “That’s about it. I don’t know what else I can say.”
“I don’t understand how he could even accuse you of such a thing. You didn’t even know that property belonged to me.” She hesitated, her gaze fixed on his face. “Did you?”
He thought he heard a tiny hint of uncertainty in her voice. It made him angrier than ever at Cody for indirectly giving her a reason to distrust him.
“No,” he said flatly. “I’m curious about something, though. Why didn’t you tell me about it yourself? Maybe if you had, we could have gotten the issue out in the open a long time ago.”
“To tell you the truth, it never even occurred to me,” she confessed with a sigh. “That property means nothing to me. I hardly even think of it as mine. Kyle had changed his will the morning of the wedding. Even if he hadn’t, I probably would have inherited it because as of that night I was his wife, his only family.”
Cord had been so caught up with Sharon Lynn, the baby and his new job, that he hadn’t even checked into the ranch. What would have been the point? He didn’t have the money to buy a bag of dirt at the moment, much less a ranch.
“Have you kept it up and running?” he asked.
She nodded. “Kyle had a good foreman out there and plenty of hired hands. I saw no reason to close it down. I let the foreman and his family move into the main house. I told him we’d keep it going for a year and see