Woodrose Mountain (20 page)

“Of course. You can still throw the ball to Jacques from the chair,” she instructed Taryn. “Try an underhand throw with your left arm. Like you’re lobbing a softball pitch. That’s it. Good.”

She led the way back into the kitchen, which now seemed stuffy and close compared to the cool mountain air outside.

“All this time. You’ve been letting him into my house for nearly two weeks!”

“He’s helping her. You should see her, Brodie. When Charlie is here, her motivation is enhanced a hundredfold. He can help her master things in half an hour that it takes me days of pushing to even persuade her to try.”

“You had to have known I would never permit it. You had no right to allow him here.”

“Wrong. You gave me the right!”

He had seen her annoyed before but not angry. Now she was glaring at him and hot color climbed her cheekbones. He refused to notice how lovely she looked. “I didn’t want to do any of this, remember?” she went on. “But you promised me I had full authority to do whatever necessary to help Taryn.”

“Is that the reason you pushed so hard to get me to promise you that? Were you planning this from the very beginning?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I never even talked to Charlie until a week after I started working with her.”

“This isn’t what I meant by full authority.”

“Next time you should clarify, then. You give me full authority to try anything—except the one thing that seems to be working!”

He glared. How was he supposed to argue this point without sounding, again, like the world’s biggest ass. “You should have told me.”

“Yes. Absolutely. You had every right to know. I should have mentioned it the first time Charlie came to the house. I’ll be completely honest with you, Brodie. Keeping it from you was sheer cowardice on my part. That is the one thing in all of this that I feel like I owe you an apology about. But I could see, even that first day, that Charlie was making all the difference in Taryn’s motivation and I was afraid you wouldn’t allow him to come anymore. I justified it by telling myself you would be more interested in outcomes than the methodology used to achieve those outcomes. It was wrong and I’m sorry.”

Damn it. He didn’t want her to go belly-up here. He just wanted the kid gone from his house.

“I can’t even look at him without wanting to pound something.”

“I know.” With sympathy-drenched eyes, she rested her fingers on his arm in that physical way she had of communicating. The heat of her and the brush of skin against skin comforted him in ways he couldn’t have explained, and he could feel some of his anger trickle away. How did she manage that so easily? She only had to touch him and his brain turned to pudding. He found it more than a little bewildering.

“I completely understand your anger toward him, Brodie, and I don’t blame you for it. But like it or not, the day he came to the bead store, it was as if he flipped some kind of switch in Taryn. I can’t argue with the results. You’ve said it yourself—look at how far she’s come, especially this past week.”

“Because of you and your hard work.”

To his regret, she slid her fingers away as she shook her head. “I would love to take all the credit, but it’s not me. Oh, I was making slow, steady progress but she fought me every step of the way. When Charlie is here, she works three times as hard. With Hannah, it’s maybe twice as hard—Charlie seems to have the magic touch—but either of them can still cajole her into doing more than I can alone.”

More than anything, he wanted to go back to those few moments before he’d walked into the house, when he had been in blissful ignorance that all this was going on behind his back. He didn’t want to deal with it. If Evie was right and Charlie was helping Taryn, how could he bar the kid from his house?

Through the kitchen window, he could see them on the deck. Taryn was laughing at something Charlie said and she looked carefree and lighthearted. As she laughed, she must have drooled a little—something she didn’t completely have under control yet—because Charlie picked up a cloth from the back of the chair and dabbed at the corner of her mouth in such a matter-of-fact way that he doubted Taryn even registered it.

His chest felt tight, fragile, as if a breeze might shatter something deep inside.

“What about Beaumont? Why is he doing this?” Brodie’s voice sounded strangled and he cleared his throat, thinking of all the dreams he’d once had for his daughter and how that kid out there had destroyed them all in one night.

Evie didn’t respond at first. She was silent for so long, he finally had to shift his attention from the scene out the window to her.

“I don’t know, if you want the truth,” she finally answered. “I think he enjoys it, actually. At first I think he came out of guilt and…” She paused. “Okay, you won’t like this either but Charlie has said something about his father encouraging the visits in the hopes it might reflect well on him during his judicial proceedings.”

His anger, which had begun to cool, hit boiling point all over again. “That sleazy bastard. And you went along with this, knowing Mayor Beaumont would like Charlie to wriggle out of these charges with less than a slap on the wrist?”

“I was looking at what was best for Taryn. You can throw any motivation at me that you want but she remains my primary concern.”

“If Charlie uses this to help him walk on the charges against him, I am going to hold you personally responsible.”

“That’s fair.”

“
Fair?
Do you know how much I hate that word? Nothing has been
fair
in our world for four damn months! Including that the one person I trusted would go behind my back like this.”

“So fire me. If you think what I’ve done is so outrageously egregious, I’ll quit right now. You’ve only got a few more days before the new aide is supposed to start anyway. I’m sure you can hobble along without me.”

He raked a hand through his hair. “How can I fire you? Look at her. She’s a different person than she was two weeks ago.”

“Then trust me, Brodie,” she pleaded. “Trust me that I would never do anything to hurt Taryn. I’m trying to help her here. I knew you wouldn’t like Charlie helping with therapy but I was willing to do it because it was working for Taryn. I thought that was worth the risk of you being angry.”

He couldn’t argue with that. Evie hadn’t wanted to help them at all because of her past pain yet she’d spent more than two weeks here, day after endless day, exercising extreme patience and calm. All for Taryn. She hadn’t acted maliciously by having the kid here. Brodie accepted that.

Right after the accident, those terrible, bleak days when doctors couldn’t say whether she would even survive her extensive injuries, Brodie had vowed to God that if He would spare Taryn, he would do anything within his power to give her the best chance at a normal life. But damn it. This wasn’t what he’d meant at all.

“I hate this.”

“I know.” She touched his arm again. Just as before, he could feel the tension and frustration inside him begin to ease as if she’d rubbed the tight muscles in his shoulders instead of merely brushing her fingers against the skin between wrist and elbow.

She hesitated for just a moment and then, before he quite realized what she intended, she followed up that soft caress with a tentative hug, her arms warm around his waist.

He froze, not sure what to do. He never had been much of a hugger, probably because his father had discouraged such obvious shows of affection. Not that his disapproval had stopped Katherine. He might have received stiff and hard disapproval from his father but Katherine had compensated with her steady love.

Evie’s simple, unexpected embrace sent comfort and calm seeping through him. Though he found it as dangerous as it was enticing, he couldn’t seem to stop himself from wrapping his arms around her and holding her close.

They stood that way for a long time, not speaking and neither seeming eager to break this fragile, tensile connection between them.

She was the first to slide away and he thought he saw the shadow of something tender and soft in her gaze before she lowered her lashes and wrapped her fingers together. “If you absolutely can’t bear the thought of Charlie being here, I’ll go out there right now and tell him to leave and not come back. I can guarantee Taryn won’t be happy about it, but this is your home and you’re her father. You get the final say.”

He was tempted. So tempted. Taryn would get over it. He was almost sure of it. The new therapist was starting the following week and maybe that would provide enough distraction that Taryn wouldn’t even remember that Charlie wasn’t here.

And maybe his mother would get a tattoo of a skull and crossbones on her forehead.

“He can keep coming but I don’t want to see him. Make sure he’s only here when I’m not.”

Her smile was more breathtaking than the sunrise breaking over the mountains after weeks of gray muck. He had the grim realization that he would be willing to do just about anything if only she would smile at him like that.

“You’re a good father, Brodie. Taryn is lucky to have you in her corner.”

He wasn’t so sure about that right now. Letting Charlie Beaumont even within a mile of her seemed like a huge mistake.

As big a mistake as allowing this dangerous tenderness for Evie Blanchard to filter through him even though he knew damn well it would never go anywhere.

* * *

H
AD
SHE
EVER
SO
MONUMENTALLY
misjudged a person?

Though she knew she needed to return to Taryn and Charlie on the deck, Evie paused for a moment to watch Brodie slide into his luxury SUV out front. She had always prided herself on her natural instincts when it came to figuring most people out, but she had been completely off the mark when it came to Brodie Thorne.

The man she had come to know these last few weeks was a vastly different creature from the cold, humorless man she’d believed him to be when she’d first arrived in Hope’s Crossing. She had despised him from the very first, had wondered how Katherine—warm, generous, loving—could have produced a man so disagreeable.

The man she mistakenly had believed he was would never have backed down from this particular fight. He would have railed and blustered, demanding his way and threatening anything in his path.

Brodie had certainly been furious, as he had every right to be. He could easily have forbidden Charlie to continue coming to the house and sent Evie packing at the same time. As far as she knew, he was right. He might even have been able to bring in the authorities—though she seriously doubted Riley McKnight would have moved forward with trespassing charges against the kid when she had allowed him to continue coming.

Despite Brodie’s anger at the deception, he hadn’t forbidden Charlie from coming again. He had been willing to swallow his own wishes for the sake of what she considered best for Taryn, and Evie didn’t know quite what to think about that.

Nor did she know why she had followed through on that insane impulse to give him a hug. She was still reeling from the sheer intimacy, the soft, gentle tenderness, of those few moments as he had wrapped his arms around her and held on tightly.

She sighed. Better not to think about it. She would be leaving in a short time and her path probably wouldn’t cross with either of the Thornes much after that.

When she walked back out to the deck, Charlie gazed at her, his eyes solemn. “I should go,” he said.

“You don’t have to,” she assured him.

“I do, actually. I’ve got a meeting I can’t miss with my attorneys.”

Despite the remarkably graceful way Brodie had handled Charlie’s presence, she could only be grateful he wasn’t here to hear that particular announcement. She was quite certain Brodie wouldn’t want to hear anything about Charlie’s defense team.

“Thanks. You were a big help today.”

“You’re welcome.” His voice sounded funny and she searched his features. He was looking at Taryn, not at Evie, and she saw guilt and regret in his eyes.

“I’ll see you later, T.”

“See…you.” She lifted her hand and waved at him.

Jacques followed him to the side gate leading to the circular drive out front and waited there as if making sure the boy got on his way safely.

“My dad was mad.”

“Yes.” She slid into the chair where Charlie had been sitting. “He had reason to be. We should have told him Charlie has been coming to visit. I was too much of a coward. Why didn’t you ever mention it to him?”

Taryn shrugged. “He doesn’t like Charlie. He never did. Can he come back?”

“For now.”

“Whew!”

Evie was compelled to be honest with the girl, as she should have been with her father from the beginning. “You need to prepare yourself that Charlie might not be able to come around much longer, Taryn. I know it’s been fun to work with him but I can’t promise it will continue. After I go back to work at the bead store next week, the new therapist might have different ideas, or your father might change his mind and decide he doesn’t want Charlie around anymore.”

“That’s so dumb.”

“It’s not dumb for your father to be upset about what happened to you. He loves you. All parents feel responsible for making sure their children are safe. Your dad feels like he failed you—and he blames Charlie for that.”