The Sweethearts’ Knitting Club (28 page)

Face it, Joe has a type and it isn’t you. Stop pining for a guy who doesn’t want you.

That would be the smart thing to do, but Ila’s heart wanted what it wanted.

Joe.

And she knew she couldn’t win his love if there was a Becca look-alike within spitting distance.

Chicago Barbie had to go.

The second Mariah saw the cabin, her heart started a slow, hard pounding.

She felt stupid for having mistaken Joe Daniels’s ranch for Dutch’s place. Darn GPS. They could be so inaccurate.

Honestly, she should have known better. Her mother had warned her not to expect too much when Mariah had called her in Argentina and told her about Dutch’s bequest.

Last year, Cassie had found true love at long last. Her soul mate. She married a retired Argentinean jockey-turned-horse-trainer named Ignacio Rodrigo, who was a shorter but more successful version of Dutch. Mariah was happy for her, but she did miss the anchor of her mother’s presence in her daily life. The distance between them had made the last few months that much harder to bear.

The cabin leaned like a drunken cowboy. A tin smokestack poked up from a roof that was missing more than a few shingles. A rusted old plow lumped up against the side of the house. Paint peeled off the sun-baked structure in long, gray, weathered strips. A derelict barbwire fence encircled the place, but at the back of the erratic enclosure sat an expansive barn, gleaming bright with fresh metal and surrounded by a solid rail horse fence.

Mariah parked beside the decrepit house and stepped out into knee-high Johnson grass. She stood eyeing the cabin, working up the courage to go inside, when a horse’s whinny drew her attention.

She turned to see a woman riding up on horseback wearing faded jeans, a turquoise Western-style shirt, dusty boots, and a battered straw cowboy hat, with the brim curled up like a tunnel, gracing silvery curls that sprang out from her head like bedsprings. The lines on her face said she was closer to seventy than sixty, but her body was as athletic as that of someone twenty years younger.

“You look like you took a wrong turn off the freeway,” the woman said in a whiskey voice. “Where do you belong?”

The question startled her, because it was one Mariah had been asking herself her whole life. She did her best to fit, blending in with whatever landscape she found herself inhabiting, but she never felt like she truly belonged anywhere. She’d grown up with rich kids, but because her mother had been a housekeeper, she hadn’t been accepted into their cliques. What she never admitted out loud to anyone was her darkest fear of being utterly alone. She had a recurring nightmare where she was an astronaut walking outside her spaceship and fell into an endless black hole. Her fate, for the rest of eternity, was to drift alone in space, no contact with anyone, completely abandoned. She always woke from the dream in a cold sweat, breathing hard and clinging to her pillow like a lifeline.

“I . . . I’m from Chicago,” she said, not really answering the woman’s question because she didn’t know how.

The woman loped closer, and then stopped the horse just a few feet from where Mariah stood. She loosened the reins so the horse could lower its head and graze on the Johnson grass. The woman lifted white eyebrows arched into a perfect V and studied her for a long moment. “You’re Dutch’s girl.”

“I am.”

The woman nodded. “You’ve got his mouth and his forehead. Eyes like your mama though. Welcome to Jubilee. Name’s Clover Dempsey. I’m the president of the Jubilee Cutters Co-op and owner of the Silver Horseshoe.”

“Okay.” Mariah still didn’t know why the woman was here.

“Dutch talked about you all the time. He was real proud of you and he was sorry about the way things were between you.”

“Yeah,” she said, unable to keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Me too.”

“Don’t be that way, hon. It don’t pay to hold on to anger. Makes you all sick inside.”

Mariah kneaded her brow with two fingers, trying to smooth out the tension. The last twenty-four hours had extracted a toll.

“So here you are. Dutch’s Flaxey.”

Flaxey.

Dutch’s childhood nickname for her because she had blond hair.

Mariah forced a smile. It wasn’t this woman’s fault she and her father barely had a relationship.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” the woman asked.

“Should I?”

A faraway look came into her blue eyes. “My husband, Carl, and I used to babysit you for Dutch and Cassie. We couldn’t have kids of our own so we spoiled you something rotten.”

“When was this?” Mariah asked, remembering none of it.

Clover waved as if shooing off a fly. “Oh, years and years ago. You were just a little thing, barely walking.”

“Where was this?”

“All over. Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, California. We followed the cutting horse circuit together. Your daddy, he had a real gift for training cutting horses. Best I ever saw.”

“Is this a cutting horse?” Mariah indicated Clover’s mount.

“Nah, Juliet is just an old broomtail like me.” Clover reached out a hand to pat the mare’s neck. “So I hear you own some highfalutin wedding planning business in the Windy City?”

“I didn’t own it. I was just an assistant.” She was more pleased than she should be to realize Dutch had followed her career. Had known what she was doing, even if, apparently, he exaggerated her role.

So what? It was easy to follow someone from afar. Much harder to get intimate with them in person.

He tried. You turned him away.

Once. He’d tried once. And she’d been a kid. Still, she couldn’t tamp down the guilt.

“Ha,” Clover said. “Assistants are the ones who really rule the world. Where would those CEOs be without ’em? Lost, that’s where.” Clover eyed Mariah. “So why wedding planning?”

Mariah shrugged. “From the time I was a little girl, I was attracted to weddings. Mom said I was besotted with brides. When it came to dolls, I didn’t want infants. I wanted bride dolls.”

“Your parents got hitched at the city hall in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Carl and I were witnesses.”

Mariah knew her parents had gotten married by the justice of the peace and only because Cassie had been pregnant. Her mother told her that while she’d been attracted to Dutch and found him exciting, she’d always known he wasn’t the love of her life. She’d said it over the years with a wistful sigh of longing, often after she read Cinderella stories about happily-ever-after to Mariah.

Cassie told her never to settle, to wait for lightning to strike before giving away her heart. Otherwise, she could find herself stranded high and dry by a man who loved something more than he loved her. In Cassie’s case, that something had been cutting horses.

“How is your mother these days?”

Mariah smiled. “She finally found true love.” Then she told Clover about Cassie and Ignacio. “They had a lavish wedding. Two hundred guests. They got married at the Chicago Botanical Gardens last June. Her colors were pink and white. My boss said Mom was one of the happiest brides she’d ever seen, and she’s seen a lot of brides.”

“I’m glad to hear Cassie finally got her happy ending.” Clover’s eyes darkened. “Sounds like things haven’t yet turned out so well for you. I see there’s no ring on your finger.”

Mariah put her hand behind her back, and then for no explicable reason she said, “I . . . I lost my job.”

“I hate to hear that. It’s tough losing any job, but when you lose one that you really loved, well, that’s a tragedy. But you’re young. You’ll find where you’re supposed to be if you keep your mind open.”

She thought about Destiny, who’d given Mariah her big break and had just as easily taken it all away.

“Well, I gotta get going. Co-op duties. On my way to check in on the Marin place, feed and water their stock, collect their mail while they’re out of town.” Clover tipped her hat, clicked her tongue to Juliet, and rode away.

Mariah watched the unexpected woman until she disappeared over the rise. All her life, loneliness had weighed against her like a heavy coin tucked into a breast pocket, small but constant. A child raised without siblings, in the households of families where she didn’t belong. The remoteness of a girl longing to be accepted but unable to lower the mask that separated her from others.

She turned and regarded the ramshackle cabin once more.

Her destiny?

Optimistic, that thought.

The truth was that coming here had been her last option, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a very poor one indeed.