Sierra's Homecoming (12 page)

Hannah's throat clenched, and she put a hand to it. “A ride like that could be the end of Tobias,” she said.

Doss shook his head. “We can't just sit here,” he countered, grim-jawed. “Get the boy ready or I'll do it myself.”

“May I remind you that Tobias is
my
son?”

“He's a McKettrick,” Doss replied flatly, as though that were the end of it—and for him, it probably was.

Present Day

T
ravis waited until Sierra had drifted off into a fitful sleep in her chair next to Liam's hospital bed. Then he got a blanket from a nurse, covered Sierra with it and left.

A few minutes later, he was behind the wheel of his truck.

The roads were sheer ice, and the sky looked gray, burdened with fresh snow. After consulting the GPS panel on his dashboard, he found the nearest Wal-Mart, parked as close to the store as he could and went inside.

Shopping was something Travis endured, and this was no exception. He took a cart and wheeled it around, choosing the things Sierra and Liam would need if this hitch in Flagstaff turned out to be longer than expected. He'd spent the night at his own place, a few miles from the hospital, showered and changed there.

When he got back from his expedition—a January Santa Claus burdened down with bulging blue plastic bags—he made his way to Liam's room.

Sierra was awake, blinking and befuddled, and so was Liam. A huge teddy bear, holding a helium balloon in one paw, sat on the bedside table. The writing on the balloon said “Get Well Soon” in big red letters.

“Eve?” Travis asked, indicating the bear with a nod of his head.

Sierra took in the bags he was carrying. “Eve,” she confirmed. “What have you got there?”

Travis grinned, though he felt tired all of a sudden, as though ten cups of coffee wouldn't keep him awake. Maybe it was the warmth of the hospital, after being out in the cold.

“A little something for everybody,” he said.

Liam was sitting up, and the breathing tube had been removed. His words came out as a sore-throated croak, but he smiled just the same, and Travis felt a pinch deep inside. The kid was so small and so brave. “Even me?”

“Especially you,” Travis said. He handed the boy one of the bags, watched as he pulled out a portable DVD player, still in its box, and the episodes of
Nova
he'd picked up to go with it.

“Wow,” Liam said, his voice so raw that it made Travis's throat ache in sympathy. “I've always wanted one of these.”

Sierra looked worried. “It's way too expensive,” she said. “We can't accept it.”

Liam hugged the box close against his little chest, obstinately possessive. Everything about him said, I'm not giving this up.

Travis ignored Sierra's statement and tossed her another of the bags, this one fat and light. “Take a shower,” he told her. “You look like somebody who just went through a harrowing medical emergency.”

She opened her mouth, closed it again. Peeked inside the bag. He'd bought her a sweatsuit, guessing at the sizes, along with toothpaste, a brush, soap and a comb.

She swallowed visibly. “Thanks.”

He nodded.

While Sierra was in Liam's bathroom, showering, Travis helped the boy get the DVD player out of the box, plugged in and running.

“Mom might not let me keep it,” Liam said sadly.

“I'm betting she will,” Travis assured him.

Liam was engrossed in an episode about killer bees when Sierra came out of the bathroom, looking scrubbed and cautiously hopeful in her dark-blue sweats. Her hair was still wet from washing, and the comb had left distinct ridges, which Travis found peculiarly poignant.

Complex emotions fell into line after that one, striking him with the impact of a runaway boxcar, but he didn't dare explore any of them right away. He'd need to be alone to do that, in his truck or with a horse. For now, he was too close to Sierra to think straight.

She glanced at Liam, softened noticeably as she saw how much he was enjoying Travis's gift. His small hands clasped the machine on either side, as though he feared someone would wrench it away.

Something similar to Travis's thoughts must have gone through her mind, because he saw a change in her face. It was a sort of resignation, and it made him want to take her in his arms—though he wasn't about to do that.

“I could use something to eat,” he said.

“Me, too,” Sierra admitted. She tapped Liam on the shoulder, and he barely looked away from the screen, where bees were swarming. Music from the speakers portended certain disaster. “You'll be all right here alone for a while, if Travis and I go down to the cafeteria?”

The boy nodded distractedly, refocused his eyes on the bees.

Sierra smiled with a tiny, forlorn twitch of her lips.

They were well away from Liam's room, and waiting for an elevator, when she finally spoke.

“I'm grateful for what you did for Liam and me,” she said, “but you shouldn't have given him something that cost so much.”

“I won't miss the money, Sierra,” Travis responded. “He's been through a lot, and he needed something else to think about besides breathing tubes, medical tests and shots.”

She gave a brief, almost clipped nod.

That McKettrick pride, Travis thought. It was something to behold.

The elevator came, and the doors opened with a cheerful chiming sound. They stepped inside, and Travis pushed the button for the lower level. Hospital cafeterias always seemed to be in the bowels of the building, like the morgues.

Downstairs, they went through the grub line with trays, and chose the least offensive-looking items from the stock array of greasy green beans, mock meat loaf, brown gravy and the like.

Sierra chose a corner table, and they sat down, facing each other. She looked like a freshly showered angel from some celestial soccer team in the athletic clothes he'd provided, and Travis wondered if she had any idea how beautiful she was.

“I'm surprised Eve hasn't shown up,” he said, to get the conversation started.

Sierra's cheeks pinkened a little, and she avoided his gaze. Poked at the faux meat loaf with a water-spotted fork.

“I don't know what I'm going to say to her,” she said. “Beyond ‘thank you,' I mean.”

“How about, ‘hello'?” Travis joked.

Sierra didn't look amused. Just nervous, like a rat cornered by a barn cat.

He reached across the table, closed his hand briefly over hers. “Look, Sierra, this doesn't have to be hard. Eve will probably do most of the talking, at least in the beginning, and she'll feed you your lines.”

She smiled again. Another tentative flicker, there and gone.

They ate in silence for a while.

“It's not as if I hate her,” Sierra said, out of the blue. “Eve, I mean.”

Travis waited, knowing they were on uneven ground. Sierra was as skittish as a spring fawn, and he didn't want to speak at the wrong time and send her bolting for the emotional underbrush.

“I don't know her,” Sierra went on. “My own mother. I saw her picture on the McKettrickCo Web site, but she told me it didn't look a thing like her.”

Still, Travis waited.

“What's she like?” Sierra asked, almost plaintively. “Really?”

“Eve is a beautiful woman,” Travis said.
Like you,
he added silently. “She's smart, and when it comes to negotiating a business deal, she's as tough as they come. She's remarkable, Sierra. Give her a chance.”

Sierra's lower lip wobbled, ever so slightly. Her blue, blue eyes were limpid with feelings Travis could only guess at. He wanted to dive into them, like a swimmer, and explore the vast inner landscape he sensed within her.

“You know what happened, don't you?” she asked, very softly. “Back when my mother and father were divorced.”

“Some of it,” Travis said, cautious, like a man touching a tender bruise.

“Dad took me to Mexico when I was two,” she said, “right after someone from Eve's lawyer's office served the papers.”

Travis nodded. “Meg told me that much.”

“As little as I was, I remembered what she smelled like, what it felt like when she held me, the sound of her voice.” A spasm of pain flinched in Sierra's eyes. “No matter how I tried, I could never recall her face. Dad made sure there weren't any pictures, and—”

He ached for her. The soupy mashed potatoes went pulpy in his mouth, and they went down like so much barbed wire when he swallowed. “What kind of man would—”

He caught himself.

None of your business, Trav.

To his surprise she smiled again, and warmth rose in her eyes. “Dad was never a model father, more like a buddy. But he took good care of me. I grew up with the kind of freedom most kids never know—running the streets of San Miguel in my bare feet. I knew all the vendors in the marketplace, and writers and artists gathered at our
casita
almost every night. Dad's mistress, Magdalena, home-schooled me. I attracted stray dogs wherever I went, and Dad always let me keep them.”

“Not a traumatic childhood,” Travis observed, still careful.

She shook her head. “Not at all. But I missed my mother desperately, just the same. For a while, I thought she'd come for me. That one day a car would pull up in front of the
casita
, and there she'd be, smiling, with her arms open. Then when there was no sign of her, and no letters came—well, I decided she must be dead. It was only after I got old enough to surf the Internet that I found her.”

“You didn't call or write?”

“It was a shock, realizing she was alive—that if I could find her, she could have found me. And she didn't. With the resources she must have had—”

Travis felt a sting of anger on Sierra's behalf. Pushed away his tray. “I used to work for Eve,” he said. “And I've known her for most of my life. I can't imagine why she wouldn't have gone in with an army, once she knew where you were.”

Sierra bit her lower lip again, so hard Travis almost expected it to bleed. Her eyes glistened with tears she was probably too proud to shed, at least for herself. She'd wept plenty for Liam, he suspected, alone and in secret. It paralyzed him when a woman cried, and yet in that moment he'd have rewritten history if he could have. He'd have been there, in the thick of Sierra's sorrows, whatever they were, to put his arms around her, promise that everything would be all right and move heaven and earth to make it so.

But the plain truth was, he hadn't been.

“I'd better get back to Liam,” she said.

He nodded.

They carried their trays to the dropping-off place, went upstairs again, entered Liam's room.

He was asleep, with the DVD player still running on his lap.

Travis went to speak to one of the nurses, a woman he knew from college, and when he came back, he found Sierra stretched out beside her son, dead to the world.

He sighed, watching the pair of them.

He'd kept himself apart, even before Brody died, busy with his career. Dated lots of women and steered clear of anything heavy.

Now, without warning, the whole equation had shifted, and there was a good chance he was in big trouble.

1919

The air was so cold it bit through the bearskin throws and Hannah's many layers of wool to her flesh. She could see her breath billowing out in front of her, blue white, like Doss's. Like Tobias's.

Her boy looked feverishly gleeful, nestled between her and Doss, as the sleigh moved over an icy trail, drawn by the big draft horses, Cain and Abel. The animals usually languished in the barn all winter; in the spring, they pulled plows in the hayfields, in the fall, harvest wagons. Summers, they grazed. They seemed spry and vigorous to Hannah, gladly surprised to be working.

Where other horses or even mules might have floundered in the deep, crusted snow, the sons of Adam, as Gabe liked to call them, pranced along as easily as they would over dry ground.

Doss held the reins in his gloved hands, hunkered down into the collar of his sheepskin-lined coat, his earlobes red under the brim of his hat. Once in a while he glanced Hannah's way, but mostly when he spared a look, it was for Tobias.

“You warm enough?” he'd asked.

And each time Tobias would nod. If his blood had been frozen in his veins, he'd have nodded, Hannah knew that, even if Doss didn't. He idolized his uncle, always had.

Would he forget Gabe entirely, once she and Doss were married?

Everything within Hannah rankled at the thought.

Why hadn't she left for Montana before it was too late?

Now she was about to tie herself, for good, to a man she lusted after but would never love.

Of course she could still go home to her folks—she knew they'd welcome her and Tobias—but suppose she
was
carrying Doss's child? Once her pregnancy became apparent, they'd know she'd behaved shamefully. The whole world would know.

How could she bear that?

No. She would go ahead and marry Doss, and let sharing her bed with him be her private consolation. She'd find a way to endure the rest, like his trying to give her orders all the time and maybe yearning after other women because he'd taken a wife out of honor, not choice.