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“Just a minute and I’ll pay you.” She took the bottles, placed them in the case by the back door and went into the house to the old desk in a corner of the kitchen. Once there she withdrew the checkbook from the top drawer, sighed when she saw the balance, and paid the Anders brothers their wages.
“Here you go,” she said, giving each boy a check when she returned to the porch. “And thanks a lot.”
“You’re welcome, and you’ll give us a call if you have any more work to do?” Jake asked.
“Sure thing,” Dani said.
Jake sighed in relief. “Hey, Cody, good news about your dad,” the cocky sixteen-year-old said.
“Yeah,” Jonathon added, following his brother around the corner of the house. A few seconds later the rumbling sound of Jake’s pickup could be heard as they drove off.
“I told you he’d come back!” Co
dy said, his brown eyes bright with pleasure.
“You sure did,” Dani replied, feeling the corners of her mouth pinch. “Why don’t you let me read what he said?”
“Sure.” Cody handed the letter to her and Dani skimmed the hastily scrawled note. It was less than a page but there was the promise that Blake would return to Martinville “sometime this fall.” She looked at the postmark. It read Molalla, Oregon; a town Dani had never heard of.
The letter was vague enough not to pin Blake down but with enough promise to keep Cody’s hopes up. Dani felt all the rage of seven long years sear through her heart.
“When do you think he’ll get here?” Cody asked.
“I don’t know,” Dani replied honestly.
“Before school starts?”
“I . . . I wouldn’t count on it. . . .”
Cody flinched. “Yeah, I know you wouldn’t. But I do! Dad says he’s comin’ home and he is!” He started to walk into the kitchen but stopped, a sudden uncomfortable thought crossing his mind. “When Dad gets here, he will stay with us, won’t he?”
“No, Cody,” Dani said, taking a firm stand.
“Why not?”
“Because your father and I aren’t married. He can’t stay here. It wouldn’t be right.”
“But he’s my dad and he lived here before!”
“I know, but Blake will probably want to be in town with his brother, Bob. He won’t want to stay here.”
“You don’t know that! He’s coming back for me and you! So you’d better let him stay here because if he has to live with Uncle Bob, then I’m going to live with him!” Cody said, taking the letter from her hand and marching through the door.
Why now? Dani wondered, fighting the tears behind her eyes. Why did Blake have to come back—or promise to—right now, when Cody was the most trouble he’d ever been and Caleb Johnson was hell-bent to take her land from her?
“Don’t borrow trouble,” she whispered staunchly to herself. Blake hadn’t returned in seven years; there was little chance he’d show up at all. Either way, Cody would be brokenhearted all over again.
“Just stay in Oregon, Blake,” she muttered, looking past the equipment on the Johnson property. It was nearly dark and the field was empty of the workers that had been there during the day. Even Chase seemed to have disappeared. Probably plotting with his partner, she thought bitterly, but couldn’t really make herself believe that Chase was quite that treacherous. “And neither is a rattlesnake,” she muttered as she looked at the troublesome sky.
Thunderclouds, heavy with the promise of rain, roiled over the peaks of the Rockies to darken the evening sky.
A cool summer shower. That was what she needed, Dani thought sadly. The summer had been unbearably hot this year and all of the tension with Cody as well as Caleb Johnson and Chase McEnroe was getting to her. The thought of rain pelting against the windowpanes and settling the dust was comforting. Maybe the rain would wash away some of the strain . . . but not if Blake were really coming back.
With a sigh Dani walked into the house and deduced from the muted sound of rock hits coming from a radio that Cody was in his room. She wanted to go to her son, try to reason with him about his father, but decided it would be better to wait until they had both cooled off.
Wearily climbing the stairs, she stopped suddenly as the thought struck her that Blake might be returning to Martinville with the express purpose of taking Cody away from her. “Not in a million years!” she thought aloud, her fingers clenching the banister. As quickly as the horrible thought came, it disappeared. Blake hadn’t wanted Cody in the first place; he’d even gone so far as to suggest that Dani have an abortion in the early months of her pregnancy. So why would he want a nine-year-old boy now?
Refusing to be trapped in the bitter memories of her stormy marriage to Blake, Dani stripped out of her dirty sweat-soaked clothes, brushed the dust from her hair and twisted it to the top of her head before settling gratefully into a hot bath.
