RaeAnne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry Summer\Woodrose Mountain\Sweet Laurel Falls (78 page)

As he drove up the hill toward Mountain Laurel Road, the
surroundings seemed more familiar, even after twenty years. In his day, this
area of town had been called Old Hope, a neighborhood of smaller, wood-framed
houses, some of them dating back to the town's past as a rough and rugged mining
town. A few of the houses had been torn down and small condominium units or more
modern homes built in their place, and many had obviously been rehabbed.

He could easily tell which were vacation homes—they invariably
had some sort of kitschy decoration on the exterior, like a crossed pair of old
wooden skis or snowshoes, or some other kind of cabin-chic decoration. He saw a
couple of carved wooden bears and even a wooden moose head on a garage.

“Turn here,” Sage said. “Our house is the small brick-and-tan
house on the right, three houses from the corner.”

From what he had just seen in town, Maura ran a prosperous
business in Hope's Crossing. According to the information he had gleaned from
Sage over the past few days, she had been married for five years to Chris
Parker, frontman for Pendragon, a band even
Jack
had
heard of before.

She must have received a healthy alimony and child support
settlement from the guy when their marriage broke up. So why was she living in a
small Craftsman bungalow that looked as though it couldn't be more than nine
hundred square feet?

Despite its small size, the house appeared cozy and warm
nestled here in the mountains. Snow drifted down to settle on the wide, deep
porch, and a brightly lit Christmas tree blazed from the double windows in
front. The lot was roomy, giving her plenty of space for an attached garage that
looked as if it had been added to the main house later.

He glimpsed movement by the side of the house and spied a
couple of cold and hungry mule deer trying to browse off the shrubs, which
looked as if they had been wrapped to avoid just such an eventuality. The deer
looked up when Jack's headlights pulled into the driveway, then it turned and
bounded away, jumping over a low cedar fence to her neighbor's property. Its
mate followed suit and disappeared in a flash of white hindquarters.

Now, there was an encounter that brought back memories. When he
was a kid and lived up Silver Strike Canyon, he and his mother would often take
walks to look for deer. She would even sometimes wake him up if a big buck would
wander through their yard.

“Thanks for the ride. I guess I'll see you in the morning.”

“I can walk you in. Help you with your bag and your
laundry.”

“You don't have to do that.”

He hadn't been given the chance to do anything to help his
daughter in nearly twenty years. Carrying in her bags was a small gesture, but
at least it was
something.
He didn't bother arguing
with her; he only climbed out of the SUV and reached into the backseat for the
wicker laundry basket she'd loaded up at her apartment in Boulder, hefted it
under one arm and picked her suitcase up with the other.

Sage made a sound of frustration, but followed him up the four
steps to the porch and unlocked the house with a set of keys she pulled from her
backpack. Warmth washed over them as Sage pushed open the door to let him
inside, and the house smelled of cinnamon and clove and evergreen branches from
the garlands draped around.

Jack found himself more interested than he probably should have
been in Maura's house. He took in the built-in bookshelves, the exposed rafters,
the extensive woodwork, all softened by colorful textiles and art-glass light
fixtures.

“Looks like Mom went all out with the Christmas decorations. A
tree and everything.”

He glanced at his daughter.
His
daughter
. Would he ever get used to that particular phrase? “You
sound surprised.”

“I thought this year she wouldn't really be in the mood for
Christmas. Usually it's her favorite time of year but, you know. Everything is
different now.”

He didn't want to feel this sympathy. For the past three days,
he had simmered in his anger that she had kept this cataclysmic thing from him
all these years. Being here in Hope's Crossing, being confronted with the
reality of her life and her pain and the difficult choices she must have faced
as a seventeen-year-old girl, everything seemed different.

He felt deflated somehow and didn't quite know what to do with
his anger.

Sage fingered an ornament on the tree that looked as if it was
glued-together Popsicle sticks. The tree was covered in similar handmade
ornaments, and he wondered which Sage had made and which had been crafted by her
younger sister.

“I hope Grandma and the aunts helped her and she didn't have to
do it by herself,” Sage fretted. “That would have been so hard for her, taking
out all these old ornaments and everything on her own.”

Sage's compassion for her mother, despite everything, touched a
chord deep inside him. There was a tight bond between the two of them. Had it
always been there, or had their shared loss this year only heightened it?

He spied a cluster of photographs on the wall, dominated by one
of Sage and Maura on a mountain trail somewhere, lit by perfect evening light
amid the ghostly trunks of an aspen grove. They had their arms around each
other, as well as a younger girl with purple highlights in her hair and a triple
row of earrings.

“This must be Layla.”

Sage moved beside him and reached a hand out to touch the
picture. “Yep. She was so pretty, wasn't she?”

“Beautiful,” he murmured. All three females were lovely. They
looked like a tight unit, and it was obvious even at a quick glance that they
had all adored each other.

Maura had been divorced for a decade and had raised both girls
on her own. How had she managed it? he wondered, then reminded himself it was
none of his business. He was here only to establish a relationship with his
newly discovered daughter, not to walk down memory lane with Maura McKnight, the
girl who had once meant everything to him.

“Oh, look. Presents.” Sage's eyes were as wide as a little
kid's as she looked at the prettily dressed packages under the tree. What had
she been like as a big-eyed preschooler waiting for Santa to arrive? He would
never know that. He'd missed all those Christmas Eves of putting out plates of
cookies and tucking his little girl into bed.

“I guess I'd better head out to find a hotel. Are you sure
you're okay now?” He couldn't see any evidence of the tears from earlier, but a
guy never could tell.

“Yeah. I'm fine. I'm just going to throw in a load of laundry
and check my Facebook, then go to bed.”

“Okay, then. I guess I'll see you in the morning.”

“Okay. Good night.”

He turned to head toward the door and had almost reached it
when her voice stopped him.

“Wait!”

He paused, then was completely disconcerted when she reached up
and kissed him on the cheek. “I'm really glad we found each other, Jack.”

On the way here, they had already had the awkward conversation
about what she should call him. She didn't feel right calling him Dad at this
point in their relationship, so he had suggested Jack.

“I am too,” he said gruffly.

He meant the words, he thought, as he walked out into the snowy
evening lit by stars and the Christmas lights of Maura's neighbors. Despite
everything, the realization that Sage was his daughter astonished and humbled
him. And yes, delighted him—even though it meant returning to Hope's Crossing
after all these years and facing the past he thought he had left far behind.

CHAPTER THREE

F
OR
A
LONG
TIME
AFTER
S
AGE
walked out with Jack, Maura sat in her chair with her hands folded together on
her desk, staring into space.

Jackson Lange was here in Hope's Crossing.

She'd never thought she would have occasion to use those
particular words together in the same sentence. Stupid and shortsighted of her,
she supposed. This was his hometown, and despite his avowed hatred of the place,
she should have expected that someday he would eventually be drawn back.

One would assume some latent affection for the town where he
had lived his first eighteen years must have seeped into his bones. It was only
natural. Salmon spent their last breaths returning to their birthplace. Why
should she simply have assumed Jackson wouldn't want to come back at least once
in twenty years?

In her own defense, she had always assumed his hatred for his
father would also serve to keep him away.

In the early years after Sage was born, she used to come up
with all these crazy, complicated scenarios in her head for what might happen if
he
did
return. She had worked it all out—what she
would say to him, how he would respond, the immense self-satisfaction she fully
expected to find from throwing back in his face that he had left her yet she had
managed to move on and survive.

In her perfect imagination, he would come back on the
proverbial hands and knees, telling her what a fool he had been, begging her to
forgive him, promising he would never be parted from her again.

Around the time she'd met Christian, she had been more than
ready to put those fantasies away as both impossible and undesirable. She had
put all her resources into thrusting Jack firmly into her past, and focusing
instead on her new relationship and the love she told herself she felt for
Chris.

She could never completely assign him to the past, of course,
not when her beautiful, smart, clever child bore half his DNA. Sage was always a
reminder of Jack. She would turn her head a certain angle, and Maura would
remember Jack looking at her the same way. Sage would come up with a
particularly persuasive argument for something, twist logic and sense in a way
that never would have occurred to Maura, and she would remember how brilliantly
Jack could do the same.

In all those early fantasies and all the years to come later,
it had never once occurred to her that someday Sage might find him on her own
and bring him back to the town he couldn't wait to leave.

Her sigh sounded pathetic in her small office, and she shook
her head. Nothing she could do about this now. Against all odds, he and Sage
had
found each other, and now she would have to
deal with the consequences of him in their lives. A smart woman would find a way
to make the best of it—but right now she didn't, for the life of her, know how
she was supposed to do that.

“Having a rough night?”

She turned at the voice and found her mother in the doorway,
still lovely at sixty with her ageless skin and Maura's own auburn hair, the
color now carefully maintained at To Dye For. Emotions crowded her chest at the
sight of the sympathy in her mother's green eyes behind her little glasses, and
she suddenly wanted to rest her head on Mary Ella's shoulder, as Sage had done
with
her
earlier, and weep and weep.

Her mother and her sisters were her best friends, and she
didn't think she would have survived the past eight months without them. Or what
she would have done twenty years ago, when she was seventeen and terrified and
pregnant in a small town that could still be closed-minded and mean about those
sorts of things.

She fought back the tears and mustered a smile. “Rough night?
Yeah. You could say that.”

“Oh, honey. Why did you keep this to yourself all these
years?”

“I didn't think it mattered. He was gone and insisted he wasn't
ever coming back. Why did I need to flit around town badmouthing him for
knocking me up and then taking off?”

Mary Ella stepped forward and pulled her into a hug, and those
blasted tears threatened again. “I have to admit, I suspected. I knew you had
become friendly with him. People told me about seeing you together. I also
suspected you had a little crush on him. I just hadn't realized things
had…progressed. I don't know how I missed it now. Sage looks a little like him,
doesn't she?”

“Do you think so?”

“The mouth and her chin.”

“She might look a little like him, but she's very much her own
person.”

“Absolutely.” Her mother leaned back a little and smoothed a
stray lock of hair away from Maura's forehead. “Everyone will understand if you
need to leave. Go home to Sage. We can carry on without you.”

She was tremendously tempted to do just that—the going home
part, anyway. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to sneak into her house,
crawl into her bed and pull the Storm at Sea quilt—the one she and her sisters
had made after her divorce—over her head and not crawl out again until the
holidays were over.

Nothing new there, she supposed. She couldn't remember a moment
in the past eight months when she
hadn't
wanted to
climb into bed and block out the world. But she was a McKnight, and the women in
her family soldiered on, no matter what.

She had managed to keep herself going all these months. She
could make it through this too.

“I'm not about to let Jackson Lange ruin the book club
Christmas party for me.” She rose on legs that felt a little unsteady. Low blood
sugar, she told herself. All she needed was a truffle or something. “Let's go
party. I think this evening calls for some of Alex's famous spiked cider. I hope
she brought some.”

“If I know your baby sister, I have no doubts of that.” Mary
Ella slipped an arm through hers and walked by her side through the bookstore
and back to the gathering.

She might have predicted the reactions of her friends and
family exactly. Angie, her oldest sister and the second mother to the six
McKnight siblings, looked at her with deep compassion and concern. Alex, younger
than her by only a few years, gave her a look that clearly conveyed solidarity
against all males of the species. Claire—Alex's best friend, who had always
seemed like part of the family and had made it official only a few weeks ago by
marrying Maura's younger brother—acted typically solicitous, handing her a mug
of something, fragrant steam curling into the air.