Love on the Mend (6 page)

Many of the children that came to the Sadler ranch ended up being adopted by families in the surrounding counties, but a few, like her, ended up staying around long term.

“I imagine it’s changed a bit since you saw it last,” she finally ventured.

“Everything’s repaired, cleaner, painted over.” His gaze zeroed in on the barn. “As if that day never occurred.”

How could she be so dull? She’d been eager for him to recognize the improvements Uncle Curtis had made, to see a reflection of how he’d turned his life around in the way he’d turned his farm around and made it a home to needy children. How could she not have understood the agony such a sight would inspire? Jacob had watched his sister die in this very yard.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t think . . .”

He glanced her way, his brows raised. “Why are you apologizing? It was my idea to come here, not yours.” He straightened his shoulders and turned his attention to the house. “I’m Adam’s physician. A few old ghosts won’t keep me from checking on the boy.” He urged his horse forward. “Let’s get going.”

Mollie followed, somewhat subdued. She recalled the whispers of the townspeople when she first came to live with Uncle Curtis. The scornful looks. The pitying glances sent her way. She hadn’t understood them then, but she’d felt their impact. It had taken years for Curtis Sadler to earn back the respect of his neighbors. To earn their forgiveness. How could she expect Jacob to give his after mere days, when his wounds went so much deeper?

“With men this is impossible,
” a familiar verse whispered through her memory, “
but with God all things are
possible.”

Mollie’s lips quirked, her natural optimism returning with a vengeance. She had nothing to mope about. God was at work and in control. Surely between the two of them, they’d have the Sadler menfolk acting like family in no time.

Twenty minutes later, a bit of the shine had worn off her rose-colored glasses. Jacob had grunted more than spoken to Uncle Curtis and had gone so far as to give her instructions to relay instead of addressing his uncle directly. He’d been friendly with Adam and had even smiled at the boy a time or two, but she could tell it’d been forced. Tension radiated from him in waves, a tension that hadn’t lessened even though they were back on their horses heading for town.

Not only would the man not talk to his uncle, but apparently he’d given up talking to her as well. That would never do. Mollie squared her shoulders. “He’s kept up with you through the years, you know.”

She threw the statement into the silence, hoping to shatter his reticence, but Jacob’s lips did nothing more than tighten into a thinner line.

“He has a box under his bed filled with letters and newspaper clippings, all about you.”

Still nothing.

Well, fine.
The Grumpy Gus could just sit there and listen, then. “A friend of his down in Galveston wrote to him regularly,” she informed him, “and the letters were always full of news about you. You should have seen how Uncle Curtis’s face lit up whenever one of those letters arrived. He’d read it to me the moment he got home.”

Those had been treasured times. Times when her imagination would run wild about a boy she’d never met. A boy who, according to the letters, got to ride ships on the ocean and scamper on the beach. Who won the school footrace five years in a row. Who excelled in every academic subject except for spelling. A boy, if she were to be completely honest with herself, she’d always been just the slightest bit jealous of—for holding such a place of honor in Uncle Curtis’s heart.

“Did you know that he found me only because he was keeping an eye on you?” Mollie pressed.

The block of stone riding the horse beside her cracked just a bit. He actually turned and met her eyes with a disbelieving scowl before jerking his attention forward again. A little surge of triumph shot through her. He might not want to admit it, but he was interested.

“After the accident, Uncle Curtis made it his mission to clean himself up and make himself a proper guardian, to find you and bring you back home. By the time he tracked you down, though, you were already living with the Thorntons. He saw how kind they were to you, how they took you in and provided for you as if you
were their own child. Most of all, he saw that with them you would be free from the constant reminders of all you had lost. He wanted that for you, for you to grow up with love and happy memories. So he never pushed himself back into your life, but he did return to Galveston every year to check up on you. And on one of those visits he found me.”

The outskirts of town grew visible up ahead, and Mollie fell silent. The horses’ hooves thudded abnormally loud into the packed dirt of the road. The call of a jay echoed like a cannon blast.

“Who wrote the letters?”

Mollie started, her gaze swinging around faster than a gate on a well-oiled hinge. “What?”

He turned, his jaw still as stony as ever, yet his eyes . . . his eyes seemed almost vulnerable. “Who wrote the letters to my uncle about me?”

“A Mr. Alfred Yates.” She smiled slightly at the name. “He would sign his letters
Alfie
, which always made me giggle. But then, he and Uncle Curtis had known each other since they were boys.”

Jacob lifted his chin in a slow, exaggerated motion. “Ah, yes. I remember Mr. Yates and his wife from church. They were good friends of my . . . of Mr. and Mrs. Thornton.”

Why did he speak of them so formally? Mollie’s brow furrowed. It had sounded like he’d been about to call them his parents but stopped himself. Why?

“I had wondered how Curtis knew enough about me to make his recommendation to the council.” Jacob nudged his horse into a trot. “Now I know. He had a spy.” At the word
spy
, he kicked Galen into a canter, veering off the road and into the woods.

Where was he going? Mollie nibbled her bottom lip, unsure if she should follow or give him privacy to deal with his demons on his own. Jacob was intelligent enough to recognize the difference between a concerned friend and a spy. That’s not what worried her. What made her want to give chase was the fact that he seemed determined to erect barriers around himself, keeping people out. Uncle Curtis. The Thorntons.
Her
. If he kept pushing people away, he’d end up alone. She knew what being alone felt like, and she wasn’t about to let him fall prey to that miserable fate.

Decision made, she steered her gray in the direction Jacob had headed but held the horse to a walk. Only one place to the south
made any sense as a destination. The graveyard at the old church. He’d want to see his family. Be close to them as he tried to find his way through the tangle he found himself in. She’d give him time to think things through before she intruded. Besides she had some thinking of her own to do.

Specifically about that kiss.

Dr. Jacob Sadler had kissed her. Ardently. And on horseback. She wasn’t sure why that last detail gave her such a thrill, but it did. It hinted at something unplanned and unrestrained. Something inspired by passion. True, he had apologized for it afterward, but an apology couldn’t undo the kiss. Couldn’t steal the memory of the way his lips felt pressed against hers or the way his hand had cupped her face and locked her in his embrace. For one blissful moment, she’d felt like she belonged, truly belonged, to another person.

Uncle Curtis had given her a home. He loved her and watched out for her, yet she didn’t feel as if she belonged to him. He had other family, or at least memories of other family. And Jacob. Whether the new doc wanted to admit to the relation or not, it existed.

She had none of that. All she had were vague memories of prim ladies in black dresses and white aprons who would slap her knuckles with a ruler if she misbehaved. No mother or father. No brother or sister. Just an orphanage, and then a group of street thieves who taught her how to pick pockets in order to line their own, and finally a kind man desperate to atone for his mistakes.

Oh, she didn’t doubt Uncle Curtis’s sincerity. He loved her. Just as she loved him. Yet that deep sense of belonging she craved always lingered barely out of reach.

Until Jacob kissed her.

She couldn’t let him push her away, not if there was a chance that he’d felt that belonging, too. Such a gift was too precious to toss aside just because things got a little difficult.

When the old church came into view, Mollie scoured the yard for sign of Jacob. His horse stood tethered near the large pine where she’d found the branches for Adam’s splint on the day of the accident, the doc’s coat draped over the saddle. She pulled her gray alongside Galen and dismounted. Making her way on foot, she circled to the rear of the church. Expecting to find Jacob at his family’s gravesite, her eyes immediately sought the marble angel Uncle Curtis had erected at his niece’s grave. It stood next to the tombstone marking
Jacob’s mother’s final resting place, with his father’s stone on the opposite side. But no Jacob. The graves had been swept clean of debris, proof that he had been there recently, yet the man himself was not in evidence. Mollie scanned the entire graveyard to no avail. Then a dull
thwack
echoed from around the side of the church.

Jacob?

Mollie moved cautiously, not wanting to startle him—or draw attention to herself if whoever was making that noise turned out to
not
be Jacob. A second thud sounded as she made a wide arc around the corner of the building. She kept to the trees, using them to camouflage her approach.

A relieved breath escaped her as she recognized the new doc’s tall frame, wide shoulders, and the black leather vest he always wore. His back was to her as he strode up to the wall of the church and pulled something free from the old boards. A knife. She’d seen the sheath he wore on his belt but had never thought much about it. All men in these parts carried either guns or knives or both. Too many dangerous critters roaming about not to. Still, it seemed out of character somehow for an educated man, a doctor, to be wielding one—against a church, of all things.

Jacob tugged the blade free, then strode back to where he’d been standing several yards away. He turned, lifted his arm, and with only the slightest hesitation, flung the blade again.
Merciful
heavens!
He’d nearly hit the exact same spot. She watched in awe as he repeated the procedure again and again. Each throw hit the same board in the old church wall, but some of the time the blade landed vertically, sometimes horizontally, and sometimes on a diagonal. And nearly every time, the blade landed farther to the right than the previous shot. At first she’d assumed the variation was due to natural error, but as she watched him, realization dawned. He knew precisely where each shot would land.

Mollie finally left the shelter of the trees, her curiosity luring her in. She’d nearly reached Jacob’s throwing spot when he yanked his blade free of the wall and turned. He froze, his gaze locking on her.

“What are you doing here?”

Mollie ignored the churning in her stomach, praying she hadn’t made a mistake by following him. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”

He lifted a brow and continued toward her. “I’m a big boy, Mollie. I can take care of myself.”

“Can you?” she challenged.

In answer he spun on the balls of his feet and flung his knife in a sharp, fluid motion. It landed diagonally, the blade piercing the same board all his other throws had hit, the slash it would leave behind closing off the letter
A.
Mollie stepped closer to the church, not quite believing what she saw. There in the wood stood four nearly perfect letters.
E M M A.
He’d spelled out his sister’s name.

Mollie followed him to the wall and ran her fingers over each of the letters as he pulled his knife from the wood and thrust it into the sheath at his waist.

“I’ve never seen such skill,” she said, pivoting to look at him.

A hint of a grin played at his mouth. “My m— er, Miss Nicole taught me. Darius calls her his pirate. Can’t say that I’d disagree, though she’s as good with numbers as she is with knives.”

“Why do you do that?”

His brow crinkled. “What?”

“Stop yourself from calling the Thorntons your parents? They raised you. Do you not think them worthy of the title?”

Fire sparked in Jacob’s blue eyes. “Darius and Nicole Thornton are worthy of any parental honor ever bestowed. They loved me like a son, and even after they had children of their own, they never once made me feel any less a part of the family. Any distance in our relationship was at my instigation, not theirs.”

His spirited defense shouted his love for them, his respect, his loyalty. So why would he feel the need to keep himself distant from them?

He must have read the question in her eyes, for he let out a heavy sigh and leaned his back against the church wall. “They wanted to adopt me,” he said at last. “Asked me every year on my birthday, in fact. But I always refused. Deep down, I think I was afraid that if I accepted their offer, I would forget the family I’d left behind. My mother. My father. Emma.” His voice cracked a bit on his sister’s name.

He turned his gaze aside and cleared his throat before continuing. “I didn’t want to forget them. They were my reason for living. My reason for becoming a doctor. Everything I became, I did to honor them. Their memories.” He grew silent for a minute, until at last he brought his eyes back to meet hers. “The Thorntons understood. They knew even before I figured it out that my keeping things separate
was just semantics. I didn’t call them
Mom
and
Dad
, but I loved them like they were. I insisted upon earning my way with them, and Darius always found a job for me to do, paying me a wage to salvage my pride even as he and Nicole made room for me in their home as a son.”

A small ironic laugh erupted then, surprising Mollie, and perhaps Jacob as well. “You know, as soon as their other kids were old enough to start doing chores around the house, Darius started paying them a wage, too. Nicole said that it was a good way for them to learn how to be responsible with money and to reinforce the value of honest labor, but I think what they really wanted was to make it clear to me that I was no less a son to them than any of their natural children.”