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Sitting upright, she let her head fall into her open palms and tried, for Cody’s sake, to pull herself together. “But why . . . why now?” she wondered. “And why didn’t you tell me when I got home?”
“Chase was there. I didn’t think it would be a good idea.”
“But that was two days ago!”
Cody looked away. “I know. But I didn’t want you to get mad at me.”
“I’m not mad at you, honey. I just wish you would have told me about this sooner.” And then seeing the wounded look in his eyes, she touched his hand and offered him an apologetic smile. “Look, honey, I’m sorry I overreacted. Okay? It’s just such a shock.”
“But he wrote. Twice. I told you he’d come back.”
“That you did,” she said with a sigh.
“You didn’t believe it, did you?”
“No, not really. Not after this long,” she admitted, bracing herself and managing a worried grin. “But it looks like I was wrong. When will he get to Martinville?”
“He didn’t know.”
“So what’s he going to do when he gets into town?”
Cody bit at his lower lip and dropped the shredded blade of grass. “He said he’d call.”
“Good.”
“You will let me see him, won’t you?”
Dani let out a long breath and fought the worry in her heart. “Of course I will,” she said, trying to keep all of her worst fears at bay. “He’s your father.”
Cody’s face split into a wide grin and impulsively he hugged his mother. “It’s gonna work out,” he said, his brown eyes sparkling. “And we’ll be a family again. Just you wait and see!”
* * *
Three days later, Dani was up to her elbows in blackberry juice.
She finished cleaning the spatters of juice from the kitchen counters and then tossed the stained rag into the sink and glanced out the window at the freshly turned earth stretching from the house to the road in a dark swath. Rubbing her tired muscles, she wondered what had possessed her to plow the front field because now she was faced with the prospect of harrowing it and getting it ready for the October planting of wheat. The ground had been nearly rock hard and it had taken hours to turn the sod.
Her back and shoulders ached and the tip
of her nose was sunburned. “This is no life for a princess,” she scolded herself, and laughed as she finished sealing the small jars of blackberry jelly she’d made earlier in the morning.
After washing her hands, she walked onto the back porch and noticed that there was no activity on Caleb’s side of the fence. Some of the heavy equipment was still parked near the stream, but it was much farther upstream and Dani couldn’t see any men working in the creek.
“Chase is probably just about done,” she murmured. And then what was she going to do? Marry him? Sell the farm to Caleb? Pull Cody out of school and move to Idaho or stay where she was? And what about the rumor in the grocery store that Caleb’s new man was trouble?
Shaking her head as if she could dislodge the doubts from her mind, she frowned to herself and wondered when Chase would return and if he’d been able to confront Caleb about the herbicide.
“Stop it,” she told herself, jerking off her apron and tossing it over the back of a chair. She walked down the two steps of the porch and leaned over the top rail of the fence, watching the horses trying to graze or find a shady spot in the open fields.
“We sure need rain,” she murmured to herself, looking upward at the clear blue sky.
Her thoughts were disturbed by the sound of a truck rolling up the drive.
Thinking Chase might have returned, Dani, her brow furrowed, walked around the outside of the house and frowned when she didn’t recognize the battered pickup slowing in the front yard.
But by the time the driver had cut the engine and stepped from the cab, Dani realized that her life had just changed forever and the meeting she had been dreading for the better part of seven years was about to take place. She was staring face to face with Cody’s father!
He didn’t look much different than the day he’d left all those years ago. Tall and rangy, with dark hair turning silver at the temples, Blake Summers was still a handsome, rugged looking man. With flashing dark eyes, a gaunt, weather-toughened face softened by a sheepish grin, he sauntered toward the house.
