AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Has your mom been talking to you again?”
“She still thinks he’s the perfect guy for me.” Dana sighed. “I guess it’s a logical, reasonable relationship, all things considered. Maybe I just need to try harder.”
“That’s the logic you’d use for picking out a used car.” Francie shook her head slowly. “You need to find someone you can love with all your heart, and who’ll love you just as much.”
“You’ve been reading again, Fran. Those magazine articles on romance and passion are probably written by people who are delusional in their spare time.”
“They’re experts. Social workers. Counselors. Psychologists...”
“Who’ve set hopes and expectations way too high for an entire generation of women.”
Francie laughed. “One of these days you’re going to find out just how wrong you are, and I sure hope I’m around to see it.”
“It won’t be in this lifetime.” Dana glanced at the wall clock, then turned to the back door. “I’ve got those five farm calls, but hope to be back by four-thirty. When the kids stop in after school, tell them to fill the water tanks in the corrals by the barn.”
“Will do. But think about what I said, okay? You used to talk about how you wanted to teach at some vet school, maybe get your advanced degree. Will you be sorry someday if you give up those dreams for someone you didn’t love, heart and soul?”
“I haven’t given those dreams a thought in years,” Dana said firmly. “This is my life now.”
But heading out onto the highway in her vet truck, Francie’s words played through her thoughts again.
She’d never planned to remarry after Ken’s death, and Tom certainly hadn’t ever asked her. But lately he had been hinting at an unspoken element of inevitability.
Probably because in a remote town the size of Fossil Hill, there weren’t a lot of choices, and all too often people chose practicality and compromise rather than being alone. Which was not the way one should address matters of the heart.
Feeling as though a weight had lifted from her soul, she pulled to the side of the road, reached for her cell phone and made the call she should have made long ago.
The phone rang six times before switching to his voice mail, but this wasn’t something to leave as a recording. She’d try again tomorrow.
Before this went any further, she and Tom needed to talk.
* * * *
ALEX SLOWED HIS GELDING to a walk as he neared Martha Benson’s old place. A mile as the crow flew, it had been an easy ride through the Rocking H north pasture.
Francie had given him homemade bread and a plastic container of chocolate chip cookies for the new neighbors. He knew he could just set them inside the back door of the house and leave.
But maybe the guy and his daughter were around. It would be sort of cool to see them again. Nothing much happened in Fossil Hill, much less this close to home.
He pulled up at the gate marking the Hathaway and Benson property line, leaned down and unfastened the chain, then sidestepped his horse neatly through it. The pasture behind Martha’s outbuildings and house was fenced, but there’d been no livestock at her place for years.
As he rode his horse closer, he saw the new guy’s SUV parked in the driveway and a shiny new pink trike by the back door. From inside the house came the sound of a soft lullaby playing.
He dismounted and tied Blaze to the hitching rail at the side of the barn, then lifted the bread and cookies out of his roomy saddlebags and headed for the house.
The windows were all open, and gauzy white curtains fluttered against the screens. Through a window at the back—a bedroom, he knew—he saw Zach’s shadowy form bend over some small, dark objects on the bed.
The man’s movements were swift and sure. Knowing he shouldn’t, yet too curious to stop himself, Alex stepped a little closer to the window. A breeze lifted the curtain higher.
He stared in shock.
The quiet city guy, the one who’d told Mom he was some sort of computer salesman, swiftly loaded cartridges into a clip, then slid it into the butt of a semiautomatic. Then he reached inside a box on the bed and took out another gun.
Alex had been around rifles and shotguns all his life. He’d started target shooting when he was seven. But only at the movies had he ever seen anything close to these.
City cops carried semiautomatics like Zach’s.
And bad guys on TV.
