Barreling through the mountains like a freight train, it had brought snow, ice, and sixty- to ninety-mile-an-hour winds that buried cattle in snowdrifts, some measuring eighteen feet high, leaving a trail of destruction and dead animals in its wake as it headed eastward into Idaho. Her teeth had chattered near to breaking as she’d joined her neighbors for days out looking for thousands of missing animals.
Unlike back then, tonight she was inside her warm and cozy home, safe in Sawyer’s arms. But she still couldn’t stop her teeth from chattering.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, over and over. She could feel his lips on her hair. Hear the steady, solid beat of his heart beneath her cheek while her own heart was wildly kicking against her ribs like a bucking horse.
“Oh, God, poor Heather. And Tom.” Trying to block out the vision of the sunny yellow minivan Tom had agreed to drive to Ashland instead of his old veterinarian pickup, Austin pressed her fingers against her eyes, so hard that all she could see were crazily floating spots.
“We just had dinner with them,” she said, as if stating that truth could reverse time back to when they’d been laughing together at the New Chance.
“I know.” His hand was soothing her back. “I said the same thing when Coop told me.”
She lifted her head and saw the truth in his somber gaze. Once again, like old times, they were on the same wavelength. And how terrible was it that this was the thought they’d have to be sharing?
She looked over at Cooper, who was still standing there, hat in hand, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere else. Or, more likely, she thought, back in time, before he’d gotten that call. “You told Rachel first.” It was not a question.
“Yeah. We figured you, Sawyer, she, and I would tell the kids in the morning. But she’s going to tell Scott first.”
Although her heart had slowed down to a more normal rhythm, her chest felt so painfully tight. Austin rubbed the heel of her hand against it as her cottony brain tried to sort that out.
“Because he lost his father.” Despite having only been together since early last fall, Rachel, Cooper, and Scott had bonded so well it was as if they’d always been a family.
“Yeah.” She knew he was uncomfortable when he dragged his hand through his hair. “She thought Scott would be able to share empathy. And let them know it gets better.”
“That’s fortunate they’ll have someone there who’ll truly understand.” Her mother abandoning her family had felt like a death at the time. But Sawyer had always been there, like a rock for her. And from then on, Austin had always been able to rely on him. Except for after she’d cut him out of her life by marrying Jace. “But reliving that time is bound to be terribly hard on him.”
“Yeah,” Cooper repeated on an exhaled breath that had her realizing that what she’d first thought to be discomfort was deep concern for the boy he loved like his own flesh-and-blood son. “Rachel’s an amazing mom. We’re going to do our best to ease any hurt, but we’re notifying the school so they can watch for any problems. We’re also setting up appointments with a therapist I’ve used for kids in bad situations before. One just for him alone, so he can share whatever he’s feeling without having to worry about us judging him. And another with him, Rachel, and me together as a family.”
“You’re a good dad, Cooper Murphy.”
Austin felt the moisture burning her eyes and blinked it away. Although she wanted to just go back to bed, hide under the covers, and sob until she was all cried out, between Sawyer’s strong arms and Cooper’s steady, reassuring attitude, she was able to clear her head enough to concentrate on what all needed to be done.
“Where will the kids stay? With you and Rachel?”
“For now. I called a woman I’ve worked with before at Child Protective Services on the way over here. We’ve been cleared as emergency temporary custodians until a permanent home can be found.”
“Tom’s parents are in Hawaii and not well enough to travel.”
Tom had been adopted at birth by older parents, who were now both in their eighties. His father was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and Heather had worried about his mother wearing herself out taking care of him twenty-four seven. When the elderly woman had broken a hip last winter, she’d had no choice but to place her husband in a long-term care home. The same one she’d ended up in.
“And, of course, Heather’s parents died when she was pregnant with Jack.” Another painful thought struck like a lightning bolt. “Heather hated driving on Duck Pond Road because that’s where they swerved to miss an elk and hit a tree.”
She closed her eyes again when she realized she’d just spoken of her best friend in past tense. How could that be? It wasn’t fair. Even as she wanted to scream, to sob, Austin struggled for calm because the children—her godchildren—were going to need her. And Sawyer.
“The location makes it even worse,” Sawyer said.
“It does. It’s so, so tragic.”
Austin drew in a breath.
Shook off the pain.
Okay. There was planning to be done, and one thing she’d always been very good at, even more so since having to scrape up income for the ranch, was to figure out ways to handle all this.
Then only once Heather and Tom were—how could this be happening?—buried and the children settled in with a new family, most likely with Rachel and Cooper, especially since Rachel had mentioned wanting another child, would Austin allow herself to weep.
14
A
USTIN DRESSED HURRIEDLY
in jeans, a shirt, and boots. After pulling her hair into a tail, she wrote a note to her dad, telling him what had happened, left it next to the coffeepot, then rejoined Sawyer and Cooper.
As she and Sawyer followed Cooper’s SUV, the butterflies she’d felt fluttering in her stomach when they’d headed off to the dinner that may or may not have been a date had returned. But this time they were giant condors, flapping oversized wings that had her feeling on the verge of throwing up.
“Are you okay?” Sawyer asked, slanting her a look as they turned onto the two-lane road. It had begun to rain again, which Austin found appropriate. It also started a “Tears in Heaven” earworm she feared she’d be hearing a lot over the next days.
She started to assure him that she was fine. Then decided there was going to be enough pretense for the kids’ sake. If she didn’t have someone she could be honest with, vent to, she’d never make it through this.
“No. I’m not. This is wrong in so many ways and on so many levels I can’t even wrap my head around it yet. I’m crushed, angry—no, make that pissed off—heartbroken, and scared to death because I’m afraid I’m going to screw this up and make things even worse for Jack and Sophie.”
“You won’t screw it up.”
“And you know that how?”
“Because you love those kids. And they love you. Heather told me at the party how wonderful you are with them. How you’re like a favorite aunt.”
“They don’t have any aunts. Or uncles.” The children were more alone than she’d been when her parents divorced. At least she’d had her father. And Sawyer.
“Family doesn’t necessarily come from blood. We make it. The way you were family with Tom, Heather, and the kids.”
She turned from looking through the rain-streaked window toward him. “If I’m like their aunt, you’d be a surrogate uncle.”
He shrugged. “It’s not the same. They haven’t seen me for over a year. A lot changes in a kid’s life in that length of time.”
“Like you said the other day, life happens,” she said. “They may have grown up some, but they’re still children. Who are going to need you.”
“I’m not going to bail on them.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that.” Sawyer, like his brothers and father, had always been faithful to the bone. “And I wasn’t lecturing you.” Though it admittedly could have sounded that way.
“They’ll be living with Coop and Rachel,” he said as he turned off the road onto the long driveway to the ranch house. “My brother’s good with kids.”
Austin felt a niggling of nerves at the back of her neck. “But he’s older,” she said carefully. “He didn’t know Tom as well as you do. Did.” Damn, there it was again. How could she possibly think about the couple as only existing in the past?
They had plans. She had them all written into the planner on her desk and, as backup, on her phone’s iCal. There was bridesmaids dress shopping with Heather for Rachel’s upcoming wedding. After that was Sophie’s thirteenth birthday party, which was taking place in a new tea shop that had recently opened on Front Street. Heather, naturally, had already gotten the pattern for her daughter’s dress and had shown Austin sketches of the hats she was making for each of the girls invited to the party. Although there would be the usual tea sandwiches and sweets, Austin was making the birthday cake.
Then came the Fourth of July rodeo, with Tom not only providing veterinarian services but taking part in the calf roping, the same way he had with Sawyer back in high school. Though Sawyer, being the more reckless of the two back then, had also done bronc and bull riding.
And that didn’t even cover typical Sunday picnics at the river, trail rides, barbecues. The patterns of Austin’s life had become so interwoven with the Campbell family she couldn’t have separated the threads if she’d wanted to. Which she hadn’t.
But that wicked bitch fate had stepped in and ripped her life to shreds, just when she was starting to get it together again.
And how could she be pitying herself while two children lay sleeping in the log house Sawyer was pulling up in front of, unaware that, come morning, their own young lives, and their hearts, would be shattered?
She was, Austin decided as she jumped out of the cab, not waiting for Sawyer to go around to open her door, a very bad person.
15
C
OOPER’S HOUSE WAS
made from logs milled on the ranch property, the same as the one Sawyer had grown up in with his brothers at the Bar M. Since the night had grown seasonally chilly, Rachel had started a fire going in the river-rock fireplace.
She greeted Austin with sad, red-rimmed eyes and a hug. “I’m so sorry.”
“I keep swinging back and forth between feeling as if I’ve broken into a million pieces and a cold numbness,” Austin admitted.
“That’s the way I was when I lost David,” Rachel said. “Later, I learned that it’s a defense our minds take on to protect us from more pain than we can deal with. The numbness gives us a chance to reboot.”
Sawyer had never heard the numbness that had settled over him like a cold blanket of snow after that last battle described that way. But it fit. Rachel’s words also reminded him that he wasn’t the first person to experience these feelings. He also hoped to hell that his future sister-in-law had escaped the grinding, soul-sucking survivor guilt he’d been slammed with.
Which brought his mind to his brother, who, as sheriff, had headed up the search party that had located the plane that had crashed into Modoc Mountain. The one carrying Coop’s high school girlfriend and first wife.
Maybe, he considered, he should talk with him. The Marine shrink had warned him that guys who tried to handle things on their own were the most likely to contribute to the rising military suicide statistics. At the time, Sawyer had said whatever he’d needed to get through his separation testing without having to spill his guts to anyone.
But Cooper wasn’t just anyone. He was someone who’d seen a lot of horrible shit and seemed to be handling life just fine. And Ryan had been a surgeon in a field hospital. If he’d been deployed when the Ranger team got ambushed, all those wounded would have first been brought to him.
Hell, Ry had probably dealt with more death than he and Cooper together. And he was doing great. So what was wrong with him? How about the fact that he was wallowing in self-pity when his best friends’ kids were going to be hit with a tsunami of pain in a couple hours?
“I’ve been thinking,” Rachel was saying to Austin, when he dragged his mind back to what was really important, “that you should be the one to tell them.”
“Me?” Austin paled.
“I can do it,” Cooper said. “It’s my job and I’ve had experience.”
“No.” Sawyer watched her stiffen her spine. The same way she had, he remembered, when Kendall Cunningham had come up to her on the playground at recess and teased her about her mother having run off. “I appreciate the offer, especially since they know and like both you and Rachel. But their mother is—was—my best friend. They’ve practically grown up on the ranch. I’d appreciate any advice you have on how best to break the news, but Rachel’s right. It should be me.”
A flash of memory came back. Winema Clinton had been the one to break the news to Austin. In the beginning, Buck had told her that her mother had taken a trip back to Sweden, as she had several times before. Finally, as the days spun into weeks, then a month, Winema had sat her down and told her the truth.
Later she’d asked her father why he hadn’t been honest in the first place, and from what she’d told Sawyer, he hadn’t known the words to say that wouldn’t hurt her. If Austin had ever considered that perhaps Buck Merrill had been protecting himself from having to deal with a heartbroken little girl, she hadn’t shared that with Sawyer.
“I just remembered something,” she said now. She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips. “I’m listed as a potential guardian in her will.”
“You are?” Sawyer wondered why he’d never heard about that.
“I am,” she confirmed. “It was years ago, right after Jack was born and they were, as Heather put it, suddenly feeling like grown-ups. They bought life insurance and had wills drawn up. She asked if I’d be willing to take the kids if something ever happened to them.”
“Of course you said yes,” Sawyer said.
“Of course. But it didn’t seem at all likely at the time. No one really ever believes they’re going to die when they write up wills, do they?”
“I didn’t even when the Marines made me list my primary next of kin before deployment.” Since his brother had always been a take-charge type of person, and it wasn’t as if Sawyer had a wife or kids, he’d named Cooper as his PNOK.