Sierra's Homecoming (23 page)

He threw up again.

Sierra snatched a handful of paper towels from the wall dispenser, wet them down at the sink and washed his face.

“My coat!” he lamented. “I don't want to leave my cowboy coat—”

“Don't worry about your coat,” Sierra said, wondering distractedly how she could possibly be the same woman who'd spent half the morning naked in Travis's bed.

The nurse, a tall blond woman with kindly blue eyes, stepped into the room, carrying Liam's coat and backpack. Silently she laid the things aside in a chair and came to assist in the cleanup effort.

Sierra went to get the coat.

“No!” Liam cried out, as she approached him with it. “What if I puke on it?”

“Sweetheart, it's cold outside, and we can always have it cleaned—”

The nurse caught her eye. Shook her head. “Let's just bundle Liam up in a couple of blankets. I'll help you get him to the car. This coat is important to him—
so
important that, sick as he was, he insisted I go and get it for him.”

Sierra bit her lip. She and the nurse wrapped Liam in the blankets, and Sierra lifted him into her arms. He was getting so big. One day soon, she probably wouldn't be able to carry him any more.

The main doors whooshed open when Sierra reached them.

“Oh, great,” Liam moaned. “Everybody's looking. Everybody knows I
ralphed.
”

Sierra hadn't noticed the children filling the corridor. The dismissal bell must have rung, but she hadn't heard it.

“It's okay, Liam,” she said.

He shook his head. “No, it
isn't!
My
mom
is carrying me out of the school in a bunch of
blankets,
like a
baby!
I'll never live this down!”

Sierra and the nurse exchanged glances.

The nurse smiled and shifted Liam's coat and backpack so she could pat his shoulder. “When you get back to school,” she said, “you come to my office and I'll tell you
plenty
of stories about things that have happened in this school over the years. You're not the first person to throw up here, Liam McKettrick, and you won't be the last, either.”

Liam lifted his head, apparently heartened. “Really?”

The nurse rolled her eyes expressively. “If you only
knew,
” she said, in a conspiratorial tone, opening the Blazer door on the passenger side, so Sierra could set Liam on the seat and buckle him in. “I wouldn't name names, of course, but I've seen kids do a lot worse than vomit.”

Sierra shut the door, turned to face the nurse.

“Thanks,” she said. Liam peered through the window, his face a greenish, bespectacled moon, his hair sticking out in spikes. “You have a unique way of comforting an embarrassed kid, but it seems to be effective.”

The nurse smiled, put out her hand. “My name is Susan Yarnia,” she said. “If you need anything, you call me, either here at the school or at home. My husband's name is Joe, and we're in the book.”

Sierra nodded. Took the coat and backpack and put them into the rig, after ferreting for Liam's inhaler, just in case he needed it on the way home. “Do you think I should take him to the clinic?” she asked in a whisper, after she'd closed the door again.

“That's up to you, of course,” Susan said. “There's been a flu bug going around, and my guess is Liam caught it. If I were you, I'd just take him home, put him to bed and make a bit of a fuss over him. See that he drinks a lot of liquids, and if you can get him to swallow a few spoonfuls of chicken soup, so much the better.”

Sierra nodded, thanked the woman again and rounded the Blazer to get behind the wheel.

“What if I spew in Aunt Meg's car?” Liam asked.

“I'll clean it up,” Sierra answered.

“This whole thing is
mortifying.
When I tell Tobias—”

Tobias.

If Sierra hadn't been pulling out on to a slick road, she probably would have slammed on the brakes.

Please don't harm my boy,
Hannah McKettrick had written, eighty-eight years ago, in her journal.
His name is Tobias. He's eight years old.

“Who is Tobias?” Sierra asked moderately, but her palms were so wet on the steering wheel that she feared her grip wouldn't hold if she had to make a sudden turn.

“The. Boy. In. My. Room,” Liam said very carefully, as though English were not even Sierra's
second
language, let alone her first. “I told you I saw him.”

“Yeah,” Sierra replied, her stomach clenching so hard that she wasn't sure
she
wouldn't be the next one to throw up, “but you didn't mention having a conversation with him.”

Liam turned away from her, rested his forehead against the passenger-side window, probably because it was cool. “I thought you'd freak,” he said. “Or send me off to some bug farm.”

Sierra drove past the clinic where she and Travis had taken Liam the day of his asthma attack. It was all she could do not to pull in and demand that he be put on life support, or air-lifted to Stanford.

It's stomach flu, she insisted to herself, and kept driving by sheer force of will.

“When have I ever threatened to send you
anywhere,
let alone to a ‘bug farm'?”

“There's always a first time,” Liam reasoned.

“You were sick last night,” Sierra realized aloud. “That's why you were so quiet at supper.”

“I was quiet at supper because I figured Tobias would be there when I went upstairs.”

“Were you scared?”

Liam flung her a scornful look. “No,” he said. And then his cheeks puffed out, and he made a strangling sound.

Sierra pulled to the side of the road, got out of the SUV and barely got around to open the door before he decorated her shoes again.

This is your real life, she thought pragmatically.

Not the two million dollars.

Not great sex in a cowboy's bed.

It's a seven-year-old boy, barfing on your shoes.

The reflections were strangely comforting, given the circumstances.

When Liam was through, she wiped off her boots with handfuls of snow, got back into the Blazer and drove to the nearest gas station, where she bought him a bottle of Gatorade so he could rinse out his mouth, spit gloriously onto the pavement, and hopefully retain enough electrolytes to keep from dehydrating.

Twilight was already gathering by the time she pulled into the garage at the ranch house, having noticed, in spite of herself, that Travis was back from wherever he'd gone, and the lights were glowing golden in the windows of his trailer.

Not that it mattered.

In fact, she wasn't the least bit relieved when he walked into the garage before she could shut the door or even turn off the engine.

Liam unsnapped his seat belt and lowered his window. “I
horked
all over the schoolhouse,” he told Travis gleefully. “People will probably talk about it for
years.
”

“Excellent,” Travis said with admiration. His eyes danced under the brim of his hat as he looked at Sierra over Liam's head, then returned his full attention to the little boy. “Need some help getting inside? One cowpoke to another?”

“Sure,” Liam replied staunchly. “Not that I couldn't make it on my own or anything.”

Travis chuckled. “Maybe you ought to carry
me,
then.” His gaze snagged Sierra's again. “It happens that I'm feeling a little weak in the knees myself.”

Sierra's face heated. She switched off the ignition.

Liam giggled, and the sound was restorative. “You're too big to carry, Travis,” he said, with such affection that Sierra's throat tightened again, and she honestly thought she'd cry.

Fortunately, Travis wasn't looking at her. He gathered Liam into his arms, blankets and all, and carried him inside. Sierra followed with her son's things, scrambling to get her emotions under control.

“It's
arctic
in here,” Liam said.

“You're right,” Travis agreed easily. He set Liam in the chair where Sierra had sat writing in the diary of a woman who was probably buried somewhere among all those bronze statues in the family cemetery, and approached the old stove. “Nothing like a good wood fire to warm a place up.”

“Drink your Gatorade,” Sierra told Liam, because she felt she had to say something, and that was all that came to mind.

“Can we sleep down here again?” Liam asked. “Like we did when the blizzard came and the furnace went out?”

“No,” Sierra answered, much too quickly.

Travis gave her a sidelong glance and a grin, then stuffed some crumpled newspaper and kindling into the belly of the wood stove, and lit the fire. Sierra shivered, hugging herself, while he adjusted the damper.

“Is something wrong with the furnace again?” she asked.

“Probably,” Travis answered.

She was oddly grateful that he hadn't called her on asking a stupid question. But then, he wouldn't. Not in front of her son. She knew that much about Travis Reid, at least. Along with the fact that he was one hell of a lover.

Don't even think about that, Sierra scolded herself. But it was like deciding not to imagine a pink elephant skating on a pond and wearing a tutu.

“I think we should all sleep right here,” Liam persisted.

Travis chuckled, more, Sierra suspected, at her discomfort than at Liam's campaign for another kitchen campout. “If a man's got a bed,” Travis said, “he ought to use it.”

Sierra's cheeks stung. “Was that necessary?” she whispered furiously, after approaching the wood box to grab up a few chunks of pine. If she was going to live in this house for a year, she'd better learn to work the stove.

“No,” Travis whispered back, “but it was fun.”

“Will you
stop?
”

Another grin. He seemed to have an infinite supply of those, and all of them were saucy. “Nope.”

“What are you guys whispering about?” Liam asked suspiciously. “Are you keeping secrets?”

Travis took the wood from Sierra's hands, stuffed it into the stove. She tried to look away but she couldn't. “No secrets,” he said.

Sierra bit her lower lip.

The kitchen began to warm up, but she couldn't be certain it was because of the fire in the cookstove.

Travis left them to go downstairs and attend to the furnace.

“I wish he was my dad,” Liam said.

Sierra blinked back more tears. Lifted her chin. “Well, he's not, sweetie,” she said gently, and with a slight quaver in her voice. “Best let it go at that, okay?”

Liam looked so sad that Sierra wanted to take him on to her lap and rock him the way she had when he was younger and a lot more amenable to motherly affection. “Okay,” he agreed.

She crossed to him, ruffled his hair, which was already mussed. “Think you could eat something?” she asked. “Maybe some chicken noodle soup?”

“Yuck,” he answered. “And I
still
think we should sleep in the kitchen, because it's cold and I'm sick and I might catch pneumonia or something up there in my room.”

The mention of Liam's room made Sierra think of Hannah again and Tobias. She went to the china cabinet, opened the drawer, raised the cover on the photo album. The journal was still there, and she looked inside.

Hannah's words.

Her words.

Nothing more.

Did she expect an answer? More lines of faded ink, entered beneath her own ballpoint scrawl?

A tingle of anticipation went through her as she closed the journal, then the album, then the drawer, and straightened.

Yes.

Oh, yes.

She
did
expect an answer.

The furnace made that familiar whooshing sound.

Liam muttered something that might have been a swear word.

Sierra pretended not to notice.

Travis came back up the basement stairs, dusting his hands together. Another job well done.

“It's still going to be
really
cold upstairs,” Liam asserted.

“You're probably right,” Travis agreed.

Sierra gave him an eloquent look.

Travis was undaunted. He just grinned another insufferable, three-alarm grin. “I'll make you a bed on the floor,” he said, and though he was looking at Sierra, he was talking to Liam. Hopefully. “Just until it gets warm upstairs.”