RaeAnne Thayne Hope's Crossings Series Volume One: Blackberry Summer\Woodrose Mountain\Sweet Laurel Falls (83 page)

“I'm not going to sue anybody.”

Don't believe him,
he wanted to
tell Maura. If Harry saw any advantage to himself in a given situation, he
wouldn't hesitate to lie, steal and betray to get his way.

“O. M. G.!”

Maura blinked at Sage's sudden exclamation. “What?”

“If Jack is my father, that means Mr. Lange is my
grandfather!”

He bit back a four-letter word. Of all the moments for Sage to
blurt out that little bit of information!

Harry's eyes widened and he looked back and forth between the
two of them. Maura was the one who had turned pale now. She looked as if she
wanted to disappear behind a bookshelf, and Jack wanted to join her.

Harry did
not
need this
information, something else he could figure out how to manipulate for his own
purposes.

“What did she say?” Harry asked.

“Nothing,” Maura muttered. “Now would be a really good time for
you to go back to sleep.”

“Who are you?” Harry asked Sage, his thick eyebrows arched like
bristly caterpillars.

“My daughter,” Maura said quickly.

He narrowed his gaze. “Your daughter died in that car accident
up Silver Strike Reservoir this spring. I was there, wasn't I? I saw the whole
thing.”

That was news to Jack. What had been his father's involvement
in the accident that killed Layla Parker?

“This is my older daughter, Sage.”

He should just keep his mouth zipped here. He knew damn well
telling him about Sage was a mistake—but he also knew Harry well enough to be
certain he would just keep pushing and pushing until somebody told him.

“And mine, apparently,” Jack finally said.

Maura sent him a quick, surprised look, as if she expected him
to deny the whole thing. Harry, on the other hand, just stared.

“Have you taken a DNA test?” he asked.

None of your damn business,
he
wanted to say. He didn't want his father mixed up in this complicated mess, but
he was coming to realize he didn't have much control over things. Harry just
might have more contact with Sage than he would. He lived in Hope's Crossing,
after all. While Jack would be back in San Francisco, Harry would be free to
pick up the phone whenever Sage was in town and meet her for lunch at the café
or the resort or any blasted place he wanted.

“She's my daughter. I'm convinced of it, and that's all that
matters.”

Harry opened his mouth to argue, but before he could, the door
to the bookstore burst open, and a pair of burly paramedics hurried inside with
emergency kits and dedicated focus.

“Back here,” Maura called and waved. They shifted directions
and headed toward them.

“I don't need the damn paramedics,” Harry grumbled.

“Well, you've got them,” Maura retorted. “Hey, Dougie.”

One of the paramedics, a guy who looked like he could probably
bench-press half the bookstore, grinned at her. “Hey, Maur. What have we
got?”

“Maybe nothing. I don't know. I just thought it would be better
to call you to check things out.”

“That's what we're here for. What happened?”

“Mr. Lange isn't feeling well. He had some kind of incident. We
were talking one moment and he fell over the next. I think he was unconscious
for about thirty seconds to a minute.”

“I didn't pass out,” Harry asserted. “I just lost my
balance.”

“And then went to the Bahamas for the next little while,” Jack
answered.

“Either way, it's a good idea to check things out,” the other
paramedic said.

“That's what I figured,” Maura answered. “He hit his head on a
table pretty hard when he fell.”

She stepped away from Harry and let the paramedics do their
thing.

“Is he going to be okay?” Sage asked him, her voice low.

He figured his father would be harassing the paramedics all the
way to the hospital, haranguing them on everything from their driving to the
accommodations. “It's just a precaution. I'm sure he'll be fine.”

For the first time, he noticed Sage looked a little pale too.
This had to be weird for her, to find herself suddenly related to the old
bastard.

“I don't need a stupid gurney.”

“Sorry, Mr. Lange. We have to follow the rules.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“You can always refuse treatment,” Dougie, Maura's friend, said
to Harry.

Jack fully expected his father would do just that, but after a
pause, Harry shrugged. “No. I'll come. I don't want to see the idiots in the
E.R., though. Call Dr. Osaka and tell him to meet us there.”

“Whatever you say, sir.”

A moment later, the paramedics finally succeeded in loading
Harry onto the gurney and rolled him out of the bookstore.

“Are you going to follow the ambulance to the hospital?” Maura
asked.

“He doesn't need me. He's made that more than clear.” He turned
to Sage. “So we're meeting for dinner. What time works for you?”

She still looked a little green around the gills, and he had a
feeling food was the last thing on her mind. “Well, I was thinking I could work
until four or so. Any time after that?”

“Let's say six-thirty. I'll pick you up at your house.”

“Great. I'll see you then.”

He picked up his jacket, shook it off from being on the ground,
then shrugged into it. With a stiff nod to Maura, he headed out into the
snow-crusted streets of Hope's Crossing.

The encounter with Harry served as a stark reminder of
everything he'd been thinking. What the hell did he know about being a father?
When he was a kid, his own example had been distant, preoccupied with work, then
increasingly sharp—bordering on cruel—as Jack had reached adolescence.

By the time his mother eventually took her own life out of
despair and loneliness and mental illness, Harry had given up any effort at
establishing a relationship and had shown nothing but disdain for him.

Maybe Jack ought to just cut Sage a break now and slip back out
of her life as quickly as he had come. She hadn't had a chance yet to establish
any real feelings for him. She had her mother, her grandmother, a strong support
network here in Hope's Crossing. Why on earth did she need
him?

He stopped himself before he could go further down that road.
The idea of leaving now, after he had only just found her, was unbearable. He
wanted to be a father to her, in whatever limited capacity he could manage.

If that meant achieving some sort of peaceful accord with
Maura, he was willing to do that too. He had to think that somewhere inside the
prickly, sad-eyed woman she had become were some traces of the smart, funny,
tender girl she had once been.

He was willing to do whatever might be necessary to find her
again.

* * *

C
OMPARED
TO
THE
EXCITEMENT
of an ambulance and paramedics and a wobbly Harry Lange,
the rest of Maura's day seemed depressingly uneventful.

Even with the hectic holiday season and the various challenges
it presented to a business owner—the crowds and the chaos and even a couple of
teenage shoplifters she had to turn over to Riley—she found that every day
seemed very much like the one before. Tomorrow would probably be more of the
same.

Every once in a while she had a wild urge to do something
crazy. To leave the store and take off cross-country skiing for the day, or
drive into Denver for some retail therapy, or just walk away from everything and
catch a flight to some secluded beach in Mexico.

She was grateful for her job and her business, for the comfort
of routine. But she still sometimes wanted to chuck everything and escape, even
in the middle of the holidays.

She looked around the store. It was nearly six-thirty, and the
crowd had thinned a great deal as people headed home or to one of the many
restaurants for dinner in Hope's Crossing. They would probably see a bit of a
spike again in about an hour, but nothing to compare to the afternoon
crowds.

“Sierra, do you think you and Joe can handle the registers by
yourselves?”

“Absolutely, Maur,” her employee assured her, flipping
stick-straight blond hair out of her eyes. “We're totally dead now. Go home and
grab some dinner and put your feet up and watch something brainless on TV!”

That idea sounded really lovely, if only she didn't have about
four hours of paperwork to do. But one of her favorite things about being a
small-business owner was that she could do said paperwork at home with her feet
up on the coffee table if she wanted—or even if she didn't want to.

“I think that's just what I'll do. Thanks for everything
today.”

“No prob. See you tomorrow.”

Maura headed back to her office to pick up her laptop. On
impulse, she sat down and grabbed the phone and quickly dialed the number to the
Hope's Crossing hospital, a small forty-bed unit that served the town and the
smaller surrounding communities.

“Yes, I'm checking on a patient. Harry Lange,” she told the
operator.

“Are you a family member of Mr. Lange's?”

Does being the recently discovered baby
mama of his estranged son count?
She sincerely doubted it. “No,” she
had to confess.

“In that case, I'm afraid I can't release any information on
Mr. Lange's condition. I'm sorry.”

“I understand. Can you transfer me to his room?” That would at
least let her know if he had been admitted.

“Yes. Hold on a moment, please.”

So he was still there. She wasn't sure why she cared about the
man's condition, as demanding and arrogant and downright unpleasant as she found
him. Much to her chagrin, some stupid part of Maura actually felt a little sorry
for Harry Lange. Despite having everything most people thought necessary for a
life to be deemed a success, Harry's unhappiness was palpable. His own choices
had left him sour and bombastic and bitterly alone.

Apparently one of those choices was to ignore the phone in his
hospital room. The phone rang eight times in the room before she was bounced
back to the chirpy operator. “I'm afraid there's no answer in that room.”

“I'll call back. Thank you.”

She hung up the phone. Maybe she ought to swing by to check on
him. She frowned at the thought. Why would she even consider it, except for the
fact that he had been standing in her store when he'd had his little
incident?

Harry Lange was none of her business. She should despise
everything about the man—because of him, Jack had turned his back on all they
might have had together.

“Trouble with a vendor?”

She turned at her mother's voice and found Mary Ella in the
doorway. She looked bright and pretty in a turtleneck with her little reading
glasses hanging by a new beaded chain Maura hadn't seen before. If she could
look half as smart and put-together as her mother when she had six decades under
her belt she would consider herself blessed.

“Not a vendor. I was just calling the hospital to check on
Harry Lange.”

Mary Ella's finely arched eyebrows shot way up. “Okay, that
statement is just wrong on so many levels. What happened to that old son of
a—er, monkey? And why on earth would you be calling to find out about it?”

“You hadn't heard? I figured the gossip would have spread all
over town by now.”

“I've been at home working on that quilt I'm making for Rose's
oldest and cleaning the house before they get here next week. I haven't talked
to a soul. What happened?”

“How's the quilt coming?”

“Fine. Now, what happened to Harry?”

Her mother's urgency made her blink. Mary Ella
despised
Harry. They had a long-standing feud and
could barely tolerate being in the same room with each other on the few
community occasions where that might be necessary.

“This morning he stopped into the bookstore to pick up a
special order. Wouldn't you know it, he walked in just as Jack was about to
leave. Seeing his long-lost son must have been too much for him. I don't know if
it was shock or disgust or something else, but he stumbled a little, hitting his
head on one of the display tables. Considering he passed out for a moment, I
insisted on calling the paramedics.”

Mary Ella sank into one of her visitor chairs. “Is he all
right?”

“Privacy laws, remember? They can't tell me anything. He seemed
fine when the paramedics came. He was sitting up and snapping at everyone before
the paramedics made him go to the hospital.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“Because Harry is a bastard. You're the first one standing in
line to call him that.”

“I am, aren't I?” Mary Ella murmured.

“I'm sure he'll be fine. He'll be stomping around town bossing
people around before we know it.” Maura decided to change the subject. She had
spent enough time worrying about Harry Lange—and his progeny—today. “So what
brings you here? Isn't it the Beadapalooza over at String Fever?”

Claire's annual event attracted beaders from around the county,
drawn to slashed prices and the great offers on bead kits. It was usually the
perfect way to de-stress from the holidays, with the bonus of allowing people
the opportunity to make a few last-minute gifts.

“Exactly. That's why I'm here. Claire sent me over to see if
you are coming.”

She refused to feel guilty for skipping this year. The book
club the night before had been more than enough socializing for her. She thought
about trying to come up with an excuse to appease her mother, but finally opted
for the truth.