Small-Town Dreams (22 page)

“Isn’t Daddy coming?” Hope asked Cole as he clipped the cell phone to his belt.

Cole glanced at his watch. “Uh, no. He said he’s sorry Jeff’s hurt.”

“He’s not sorry. He hates Jeff. I’d like you to give him a message for me. Tell him what I told Jeff earlier today. If Dad forces me to choose between him and Jeff, Dad loses.”

T
he first thing Jeff saw when the fog in his brain lifted was Hope’s lovely face. She was staring at him as if trying to will him awake. He was glad to grant her wish. “Hi, there,” he said, then frowned. Why did he sound so woozy?

“Hi, yourself. You gave us all a terrible scare. But it’s all going to be fine now. We’ll get you well.”

He remembered then. He’d been about to tell Hope how he felt about her when she’d gotten all skittish and taken Golden Boy downhill. He’d followed, but then during a perfectly routine jump, the world had dropped out from beneath him. He didn’t even remember hitting the ground. Just a feeling of dizziness as he slid backward when he should have been flying over the jump on Prize’s back.

And he remembered Hope screaming his name.

How, he wondered, could life change so drastically in a few seconds? His life was gone—over. He might as well be dead.

“What happened?” he asked, nearly desperate to hear it confirmed by the person who’d shared so life-ending an event.

“Prize took the hedge and the saddle broke away. I can’t remember it being at all damaged when I tightened the girth.” Hope bit her lip, clearly fighting tears. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered brokenly.

He wanted to tell her not to feel responsible. That accidents happened. He wanted to tell her to go home and get on with her life, but his eyes grew heavy again, and soon he was floating away from her to a place where he could still fly over the fields and laugh with her as they rode.

Jeff opened his eyes some time later and stared at the green ceiling. Who on earth had had the poor taste to paint a bedroom institutional green? The clatter of a cart drew his attention and he watched, detached from his body, as a young woman walked to his bed. Without ceremony she stuck a needle in an IV tube.

He frowned, remembering. He was in the hospital. In some sort of weird bed with rings at the bottom and top attached to some sort of framework that surrounded him. He couldn’t move his legs, and some fool had kept him alive. “Too much,” he told the nurse, though his lips and tongue felt numb.

“This is just a muscle relaxer to keep your back from going into spasms again. Don’t worry. It won’t hurt you and it shouldn’t knock you out.”

“No. You don’t get it. Give me too much. Kill me. Got it?”

He heard a gasp from the foot of the bed and found Hope staring at him in horror. His heart constricted. She was still there. She’d heard.

He’d drag her down with him. His life was clearly over, and he couldn’t stand to let this thing destroy Hope the way it had him.

“Go away, Hope. There’s no need for you to sit there and watch me lying here. From what Dr. Chin said, this is about as exciting as I’m ever going to get.”

“Of course, it isn’t.”

Hope hurried to his side and took his hand. He wanted to feel her touch into eternity. It was such a temptation to tie her to him, but he couldn’t do that to the free spirit that was Hope. She’d been crying. It was blatantly obvious. He hated the thought of her tears almost as much as the forced smile she tried to hide them with.

“And you say
I’m
a poor liar,” he challenged.

“I’m serious. You’re going to be out of that bed in no time. There’s no way yet to know how much you’ll improve when the swelling decreases. I’m not leaving you. And Cole was here earlier, too, but there was some sort of emergency at home. He’ll be back as soon as he can get here.”

“Tell him not to bother. He has better things to do than waste his time on me.”

“Don’t be silly. Cole is your friend. Where else would he be when you need him? Where else would
I
be?”

“I’d prefer you be anywhere else.” Remembering how badly he’d done at lying to her on Saturday night, he turned his head. “Look, Hope, when the horse reared, I was about to tell you that you were barking up the wrong tree with your feelings for me. You’re the little sister I never had. And a friend. But you’ll never be more. I shouldn’t have led you on at the Valentine’s dance. But handing Elizabeth off to Cole was too big a break to pass up. I was doing him a favor getting them together, but Cole wouldn’t have appreciated the gesture. Telling Cole I wanted to spend time with you was a good way not to give Elizabeth’s intentions away.”

“Oh.”

The hollow hurt in her voice nearly killed him, but he had to let it stand. He had to make her get out of there. But before he could go further, Cole stepped into the doorway. He looked as bad as Hope.

“How’s it going, buddy?” Cole asked, quietly.

Jeff responded in what was undoubtedly the least chivalrous comment he’d ever made in front of a lady in his entire life.

“That’s pretty bad,” Cole said lightly, clearly trying to lessen the impact of the ugly phrase, but then he sobered. “I got back here as soon as I could.”

“That’s good. You can get Hope to leave. I told her not to blame herself. Accidents happen.”

Cole shook his head. “I don’t think she’s about to desert a friend like that.”

Hope. He knew her. She’d stay glued to his side whether he ever got out of this crazy contraption of a bed again or not. She was blaming herself. Jeff looked from Cole to Hope. There was one way to make sure he didn’t drag Hope down with him. “I’m not up to company of any kind.” He studiously ignored her hurt and confusion. This was for the best. “I don’t want you back here again. Leave me alone.”

“Jeff?” Hope’s voice sounded small and wounded. “It isn’t hopeless.”

He gritted his teeth. That’s exactly what his life was about to become. “If we were ever friends, we aren’t anymore. You’re smothering me, and there’s nothing I hate more. Get out, Hope.” Jeff turned his head away, and when he looked back minutes later, he was alone.

Now he could let his tears fall. Now he really
had
lost everything. Now he’d lost his Hope.

Two weeks later, time hadn’t improved his paralysis and the doctors continued to lie, saying he could still see improvement at any time. They sent therapists and more doctors. But he knew it was hopeless.

Just like his life. Hopeless.

He’d banned Hope from his room. He wasn’t proud of hurting her, but he knew it was for her own good, and he even thought Cole more or less understood that he couldn’t let her sacrifice even an hour on him.

In the past two weeks, he’d lost all dignity. He was grateful his parents hadn’t lived to see this. There’d been no room in their lives for imperfection, and he was about as imperfect as you could get. They would have been appalled by his helpless condition.

He was appalled.

He was going home today, but the doctors wanted him to go to some sort of rehabilitation facility. Jeff just wanted to go home and hide where no one could see him. He’d had it with visitors.

In the last two weeks they’d arrived as a steady flow at first and had thankfully dwindled to an annoying few. Either they treated him with an embarrassing kind of pity, asked humiliating questions about how much of his body still functioned or shot subtle little barbs at him about his lack of mobility. These were the people he’d considered friends, but Hope had been telling him for years they were no more than opportunists and social climbers.

He’d always known she was right, but he’d never needed anyone before, so it hadn’t mattered. They’d filled his idle time, and he’d thought they would again. But now, when it did matter, he had no one. Which, he told himself, was just as well.

He wanted to crawl into a hole and pull it in after him. But he couldn’t even crawl anymore.

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Mrs. Larchmont. Butternut and Stephanie are working well together,” Hope told the pushy mother. Then listened as the woman, who didn’t know which end of a horse to feed, told Hope that her Steffie needed an animal with spirit and that as her parents it was their duty to see she had what she needed. The couple had bought the perfect stallion that morning, and he would be arriving any day. Butternut was up for sale.

“Fine, we’ll await his arrival and see how well Stephanie takes to him. See you Tuesday.” Hope dropped the phone in the cradle and buried her face in her hands.

Lord give me strength.

Another nitwit. In the four weeks since Jeff’s accident, they’d lost more than fifty percent of their business due to rumors of carelessness at Laurel Glen. Now Mildred Larchmont was insisting her ninety-pound skittish child could control a stallion named Demon.

Hope dropped her hands, flipped her month-at-a-glance calendar back a page and stared at the twenty-first of February. One month ago to the day. The date of Jeff’s accident sat there in its little box unmarked, unchecked. She needed no reminder. She’d never forget that date if she lived to be a thousand. It was the day she’d lost not only her best friend but the love of her life, as well.

A month. She couldn’t remember a month in her whole life when she hadn’t seen Jeff at least once if he was in town. But he wouldn’t see her. Two years older than Cole, Jeff had always been in her life because their mothers were friends. The boys had played together since Cole was a toddler. So Jeff had been around from her earliest memory. He used to tell her she’d pulled his hair from her crib and she was still yanking his chain.

And now Jeff had summarily cut her from his life. He’d gone so far as to have a guard put on the gate to turn her away. Her brother went to see him several times a week, but he always shook his head when he returned. Jeff still refused to see her.

She was nearly positive that he’d lied about his feelings for her. Jeff didn’t have a cruel bone in his body, and it would have been cruel to send her flowers, beg to see her, stroll along the drive with his arm around her and then plan to tell her she was nothing more than a substitute for the sister he’d never had. Either he blamed her for what had happened even though he’d said he didn’t or he was trying to save her from his daily struggle.

Whatever his reasons, guilt weighed on her. He was alone and hurt because of her, no matter how she looked at the situation. She prayed about it, and for Jeff, but nothing had changed. She still had to rely on progress reports from Emily Roberts when she saw Lavender Hill’s housekeeper on Sundays and Wednesdays at church and on what Cole told her, which was very little. Emily’s reports, however, were so depressing that Hope understood Cole’s reluctance to go into detail.

From what Emily said, Jeff wasn’t trying to get better. Cole said the doctor in the E.R. mentioned that Jeff had a six-month window of opportunity to regain full use of his legs. But Emily said he’d fired everyone who’d tried to push him toward exercise and therapy. Hope stared at the date. March twenty-first. One sixth of his time was gone.

Hope looked up when her father walked into the office. Relations between them were better, but Hope knew it had nothing to do with any attitude adjustment on his part. Any improvement was due to the absence of Jeff from her life and her own determination to forgive her father’s lack of support the day of the accident. She prayed daily to feel the forgiveness she’d decided to grant.

“Sorry, Daddy. Mrs. Larchmont won’t budge. Want to buy Butternut? A stallion named Demon arrives before Tuesday. I hope that child doesn’t get hurt. I don’t know what else to do.”

“See if Cole gets any bad vibes before you put her up on the stallion.”

His sarcasm wasn’t lost on Hope. She slapped her hand on her scarred oak desk. “That crack was unnecessary. Cole really does have an incredible rapport with the horses.”

“I don’t know Cole anymore, but that’s what I hear.”

“You know, if you’d stop trying to find fault with him all the time, and if you’d stop baiting him, maybe you would know him. He came home to try working things out with you. If you look, you might find out what a wonderful man your son really is.”

“He has an attitude with me that just sets my teeth on edge. Always has.”

“Always, Daddy? Or just since Mother was killed?” Hope asked. She saw the anger leap in his eyes, but she pushed on. Living and working at Laurel Glen had become intolerable, and things had to change. Aunt Meg was right. How long were they going to tiptoe around the tragedy that had split their family?

“And your point is?” he asked, suddenly tight-lipped and tense, his hands fisted on his jeans-clad hips.

“My point is that you two have to work through Mother’s death or neither of you will ever get past your grief. It keeps you both mired in the past. You have to admit that maybe he did sense something in the horse that day. And he has to admit that you made a mistake. An honest one. You have to accept it, too.”

Hope’s heart softened. She knew how much it hurt to love as deeply as her father had only to lose that love. “When she died, all this started. She wouldn’t have wanted to come between the two of you.”

“You don’t know—” Her father stopped short and frowned. Then he nodded stiffly. “I’ll try if he will.”

“He
is
trying. He came home. Imagine how hard that had to be for him. He left here in disgrace. Military school or juvenile hall. Some choice. He’s a respected man away from here. Don’t rise to the bait if he baits you. Don’t bait him or criticize every word that comes out of his mouth. Don’t question his judgment where the stock is concerned. He’s the one with the degree, remember?”