Redwood Bend (27 page)

“I was in Iraq three years ago,” he said. “So, you’ve been widowed for a while.”

“Five years plus,” she said. “Charlie was in the army.”

“Again, I’m sorry, Katie. On my way home to Virgin River, I stopped off to visit a buddy’s widow. We’ve lost some real good men.”

“How’s your friend’s widow doing?”

He shook his head. “She’s having some real hard times right now, but she has family around. I think I might head back there to check on her after we harvest the apples.”

That touched her; what a nice man, she thought. But then, some of Charlie’s buddies had visited her.

“I guess it’s not too soon for you to think about dating,” he said.

She knew it was coming. She had sensed it from their first meeting. “Well, it’s not. But it’s an awkward moment—I’m kind of…” She stopped to think of how she should put this, exactly. “I guess the only way to describe it is, interested in someone.”

He grinned at her. “I guess the best thing for me to do is hang around till you lose interest.”

And then, with the most miserable timing, Dylan pulled into the clearing, parking beside Katie’s SUV. He had his motorcycle propped up and strapped into the bed of the truck. The place was starting to look like a parking lot.

Dylan didn’t seem to be intimidated by the presence of another man. He jumped out of the truck and sauntered toward the porch, his boots hitting the ground pretty hard, his thumbs in his pockets. He was smiling, but it looked pretty contorted given his bruised face. “Howdy,” he said, sticking out his hand toward Tom. “I’m Dylan.”

Tom stood uneasily. “Tom,” he said. “Tom Cavanaugh. What happened, man?”

“This?” he asked, pointing to his face. “Katie roughed me up.”

“I did not!”

“Accident,” Dylan said with a laugh. “Always wear a helmet, man. Katie, I brought you a six-pack and some other stuff.” And he turned and went back to his truck. He proceeded to take grocery bags into the house.

“That him?” Tom asked. “The one you’re interested in?”

Katie scowled. “No,” she said. “Dylan is just a friend. Passing through town. He’ll be leaving soon.”

Dylan stuck his head out of the door and said, “Actually, I thought I might stay a couple of days, if that’s not a problem. Really great to meet you, Tom.” And then he disappeared into the cabin again.

Katie looked at Tom. “Ever have one of those annoying visitors? The kind who just doesn’t get it when they’re not actually
invited?
”

Tom laughed. “Maxie, my grandmother, has a million friends. She never had a visitor she wanted to leave.”

“Hmm. Maybe she’d like to have Dylan,” she offered.

Tom laughed and stood up. “I’ll call the game warden, Katie. Listen, don’t become the bear’s adversary. Stay out of her way. New mothers can be unpredictable.”

Dylan heard the talk on the porch.
Is he the one you’re interested in? No, just a friend, passing through town…
He chuckled soundlessly. He was still putting food in the refrigerator when he heard Tom’s truck start up and back out of the clearing. And then Katie was there. “Oh, you’re funny,” she said. “I guess if I’d wanted you to stick around before I should’ve just told you to leave.”

“Are you throwing out the dating net, Katie?” he asked.

“That’s none of your business…”

“You should tell me so I can manage to be…ah…unobtrusive when young Tom comes calling.”

“How about absent? Absent would be so much more convenient than unobtrusive.”

His expression became serious. “Look, I don’t blame you for not wanting to move in with your brother—I personally think he has a short fuse and a very crabby disposition. But I don’t think you should be all alone out here. I’m cooking tonight—my special pizza. The boys will love it. I’ll take the couch.”

She put her hands on her hips. “I don’t think so.”

“Then I’ll sleep in the truck. Or on the porch—I have a sleeping bag.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Being responsible? Helping out?”

“I’m not your responsibility,” Katie said. “And you’re confusing me. You’re in, you’re out, you’re back, you’re leaving…”

“I missed you,” he said. “And I shouldn’t have left the way I did. But I had to leave. And we’re not done talking…”

“Don’t you have to get back to work? Don’t you have an airline and airport to run? A movie to make? The paper says you’re living on a big estate in Montana—you won’t be happy on a couch. Or a porch.”

He scrunched up his eyebrows. “Estate?”

“Your grandmother’s estate…”

“Estate?” he said again.

She sighed deeply. “Airline? You own the airport it operates out of? Your rich and famous grandmother’s estate? Am I speaking a foreign language here?” she asked.

He was careful with his answer; he was not smiling. “I checked in with the company. They’re maintaining in my absence. And the ‘estate’ is being watched over. Would you like me to take you on a nice long, exciting bike ride? That used to blow your whistle.”

Her hand slid over her belly. “Maybe not while I still have the remnants of this little bug…”

“Shouldn’t you be better by now?”

“Something’s going around, so don’t breathe my air. You don’t want to catch it.”

“I’m not too worried about that. I’d be willing to take my chances for a whiff of your air.”

“As flirting goes, you might be losing your touch.”

“Okay, tell me this. How do we make peace with your big mean brother so I don’t get hauled off the couch and beat senseless in the dark of night?”

She couldn’t help but smile at him. “Already on the couch, are you? I thought you were taking the truck or the porch.”

“I’m trying to make up, Katie. Work with me here.”

“Leslie and I will take care of you and Conner,” she said. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

Dylan smiled broadly. He was feeling a sense of safety and familiarity. This was one of the reasons he hadn’t fallen in love before, he realized. He was used to women who thought he was important, either as an actor or the owner of an airline. Hah—two six-seaters and a Lear! Or the owner of an airport—a relatively short runway paved onto his grandmother’s back forty and a couple of Quonset hangers and a prefab building for an office. Oh, yeah, there was that wind sock. Suddenly he wondered how many people thought he lived on an “estate.”

Katie wasn’t that impressed. She wouldn’t trade a thing for his importance. The two women Dylan admired most were his grandmother and his best friend’s wife, and Adele and Sue Ann didn’t need a man to define them, bring their value into focus. He was ready to add Katie to that group, but…

“When I explain that he has to be nice to you, what should I say you’re doing here? Exactly.”

“I told you. I’m trying to make amends for acting like an ass after having a very romantic fling with you. A fling that shouldn’t be finished anytime soon.”

“I don’t know how that’ll go over,” she said.

“You don’t have to tell him about the fling unless you want to. Know what I really wish, Katie?” he said. “I wish we could start over. I wish I could unsay a bunch of stuff and say some new things.”

Her hand slid over her stomach again and she said, “Too late, I’m afraid. I didn’t trust you too much before and I trust you a little less now.”

He had work to do here, he realized. Serious work, regaining her trust. “Can I see those articles again? The ones you saved?”

“Knock yourself out,” she said. “I’ll call Leslie at work. We can decide what to do with you two imbeciles.”

So while she headed for the phone, he headed for the trunk. And he listened to what she was saying.

“Well, he was on his way out here to apologize for being a jerk when Conner went after him, so now I’ve got this banged-up guy on my couch, trying to make amends…”

“Couch,” he muttered under his breath with a smile.

“Do you think that’s a good idea, getting them together? No, no of course not! Just the bare…you know…And let’s not push on that—that’s up to
me!
And tell Conner he’d better remember that! Yes, I told him he’s forgiven, but I don’t think I want to get mixed up with him again. But it’s still inexcusable for Conner to be beating him up like that! You should see his face! Oh, really?” she asked, then laughed.

Dylan turned and looked toward the kitchen.

“Apparently you did some damage, too,” she told Dylan. “Broke his nose.”

“Self-defense,” Dylan reminded her.

“Okay, we’ll do that later,” she said into the phone. “But you talk to him first—I don’t want a repeat of this insanity. And I definitely don’t want that happening in front of the boys.”

Dylan was multitasking. He read the articles and captions while he listened to Katie—there was a reason why he never looked at the tabloids. It was all such a bunch of crap. There was speculation about whether he’d be getting together romantically with Lindsey, his old costar. Now, that didn’t hurt him in any way, but what about her? She had a good marriage to a great guy and a couple of little kids. This kind of reporting was irresponsible and could create problems where there were none. There were plenty of seedy stories out there without victimizing her.

Katie and Leslie had moved on to the bear, the summer program the boys were in and Tom, the guy who was going to call Fish and Game. They started laughing about something to do with Conner’s nose.

Dylan read that he’d been living on his grandmother’s Montana estate and a snort escaped him. It was a four-bedroom, two-bath, thirty-five-year-old ranch-style house. It was perfectly nice; he’d had the kitchen remodeled about ten years ago and replaced some carpeting. There were some real nice hardwood floors and he had landscaped the backyard a few years ago, adding a big patio and grill he could use about three months of the year. But
estate?
It was around twenty-four hundred square feet of house and except for the yard surrounding the house, it was raw land in the valley that was Payne. There was a barn, a shed, a corral, a pasture. And there was Ham, doing his chores, letting himself into Dylan’s house to make a sandwich when he got hungry.

And damn, he wanted her there. Suddenly that’s what he wanted. To take Katie home with him.

Katie was talking about someone who lived on Leslie’s street—the girls, she called them. Apparently Katie had settled in and had girlfriends.

Dylan poked through the trunk. He lifted out a photo album and flipped through some pages. Baby pictures of the twins, from the first day to about three months, but the man in the pictures wasn’t their dad, it was their uncle. The next album he recognized as a wedding album and that got him a little wound up. Being a fairly typical man, he’d usually only look at wedding pictures if torture were the alternative. But he wanted to see Katie all dressed up and he wanted to see the guy who caught her.