TAKE A CHANCE (Chance Colorado Series) (2 page)

Oh, Lord. Had her grandmother actually stooped to playing the infamous Flynn guilt card? It wouldn’t work on her. Not this time. Allie refused to be manipulated like that.

“I can’t come back home, Mama Odie. I’ve built a life out here. I have a good job and a serious boyfriend. I can’t move back to Chance.”

She wouldn’t. Eight years ago, when she’d escaped that little wide spot in the road, she’d sworn she’d never go back again and she’d meant it. The world was too big to spend her whole life in Chance, Colorado, where everybody in town knew everything about her.

Her job in Waco was perfect. Or it would be, just as soon as the economy improved enough that the owners could pull their little bookstore out of its death spiral.

And even if the store did close, she still had Drake. He hadn’t popped the question or anything yet, but that didn’t matter. What they had was stronger than any formal bond. He told her so all the time. And though it had taken nearly two years, she’d finally let him inside her defenses. Part of the way inside, at least. Full trust was something she wasn’t sure she could ever give any man.

A disapproving snort sounded on the other end of the line, drawing her attention back to the conversation.

“Blood is thicker than water, and don’t you go forgetting that, young lady.”

Her grandmother didn’t understand. Didn’t want to understand. Odetta had spent her whole life in their little hometown, so she couldn’t possibly be expected to accept Allie’s need to be anywhere in the world except Chance.

Still, Allie knew her grandmother meant well.

“Once Matt is all settled in here at the hospital, I’ll see if I can get some time off from the store. Maybe I can come and stay for a week or so.”

With each word of her offer, the knot in Allie’s stomach twisted tighter. She hadn’t been home for eight years. Even when her dad had died, she’d made the excuse that she couldn’t get away from work long enough to do more than attend his burial ceremony at Fort Logan in Denver.

“A week or so,” her grandmother scoffed. “You need to get your head on straight, Allison Elise. You better get your priorities in order before it’s too late. What you have out there—a job, some man—they don’t mean jack squat in the long run. Push come to shove, it’s only your family that will be there for you. And now’s the time you need to be there for your family.”

Allie couldn’t have this discussion right now. Not standing here with the smell of alcohol swabs and disinfectant pounding at her senses. She couldn’t even think straight, let alone deliver a convincing argument to her grandmother about what she needed for her own future.

“I have to go, Mama Odie. Promise you’ll call me the minute you hear anything about Mom, okay? I mean it. The very minute.”

“Okay, Allie, I will. But you think hard about what I said. Now, you go tell Matt that his Mama Odie is keeping a dialog ongoing with the man upstairs that he should heal real fast and come home to us where he belongs.”

“I will. Love you.”

Silence pulsed into her ear as she held the phone close to her cheek for a few seconds longer before shutting it down and slipping it into the pocket of her jeans. With a glance down the long, empty hallway, she headed out through the big glass doors and breathed in the fresh morning air.

The nurse would be back any time now to take her up to Matt’s room, but Allie needed a second to sort out her tangled emotions before she spoke to her brother. Guilt was eating her alive, but how could she possibly pull up roots and go back to Chance? She couldn’t.

Here in Texas, she was her own woman. In Chance, she’d simply be that pathetic Flynn girl who’d had the hopeless crush on her older brother’s best friend. She wasn’t sure her ego could stand that. Besides, she had too many good things in her life to simply turn her back and walk away.

Drake.

Once more she wished he’d been able to get away from work to come with her today. A quick call to hear his voice and she’d no doubt feel more centered and strong enough to face all of these challenges head-on.

Three rings and the call went to voice mail, so she ended it and waited a full minute before trying again. Odd that he wasn’t answering. He should be in the office by now, because he’d said he had a heavy schedule and couldn’t get off work today. That was why he couldn’t come with her.

Only one ring this time before the line came to life.

“Hello, hello!” a familiar female voice sang into her ear as Drake’s voice boomed in the background.

“Goddammit, Cara. I told you not to answer my cell. Hand it over right now.”

Cara? As in her neighbor, Cara? The one who always had some excuse to show up at her front door to ask for Drake’s help whenever he was over? It was always something with that woman——her car wouldn’t start or a door was stuck or she had a box she couldn’t lift.
That
Cara?

“Hey, lover.” Drake sounded breathless, like he’d been running. “I didn’t expect to hear from you this morning. I thought you were going to be tied up with your brother all day.”

Tied up with her brother and too busy to check on him? Apparently, that was exactly what he’d thought.

“And I thought you had to work. What’s going on there, Drake?”

A surreal stillness settled over her as she waited for his answer. She should have expected something exactly like this. She’d been a fool to think he wouldn’t betray her the first chance he got. She’d been a fool to think he was somehow a better man than her dad had been. They couldn’t help it — not even the best of them. One day, something snapped, and they turned into this.

Time felt as if it slowed, magnifying all the sounds coming through the phone in her hand. Giggling in the background. A squealed “Where’d you hide my panties this time?” A nervous chuckle from Drake.

“It’s not as bad as you’re imagining, lover. Really, it isn’t.”

It didn’t take too much imagination to figure out exactly what was going on.

“No? Then how bad is it…
lover
?”

“It’s not what you think. I just came over to help Cara with a leaky faucet. That’s all.”

“A leaky faucet,” Allie repeated, her voice echoing coldly in her own ears. “What part of the repair required hiding Cara’s underwear?”

“Listen to me, Al. I can explain everything. It was an accident. One thing led to another and it just sort of happened. I swear to God, it was only this one time. And only because you were gone and I was lonely. It’ll never happen again, I promise. I’ll come over when you get home and we’ll talk through this whole thing. We’ll get everything straightened out.”

No, they wouldn’t.

She wasn’t that stupid. What was happening there was exactly what it had sounded like. He’d confirmed it for her. She’d seen the signs for the last few months and had chosen to ignore them. But now, the time to ignore had come to an end. Betrayal of her trust was something she couldn’t forgive.

“I don’t think so, Drake. There’s nothing to straighten out. I don’t want to talk to you. Not about this or anything else. We’re done. Don’t bother coming over again.”

“But lover…”

“Seriously. Don’t bother.”

Allie ended the call and turned off her phone in case Drake tried to call her back. She waited for some sort of fury or pain to set in, but they didn’t come. She didn’t even feel surprise over Drake’s cheating. It was as if her emotions had gone into total hibernation.

She felt completely numb. A numbness that permeated her whole being, accompanied by something strangely like resignation.

She’d been wrong. Drake was no different from any other man. No different from her own father had been. He’d cheated on her just like her father had cheated on her mom. The only difference was that he’d started earlier and she’d found out now, before their relationship went any further. Unlike her mom, who put twenty years and two kids into a relationship without knowing what her husband was capable of doing behind her back. If his car hadn’t gone off the side of the mountain with his mistress sitting next to him, she might never have known.

It was better this way. Better to have his cheating ways out in the open before her heart had a chance to grow any more invested in him. In them.

Allie smoothed her hair away from her face with a shaking hand and pushed back through the glass doors in time to see the nurse hurrying down the hall in her direction. Pasting a smile on her face that she didn’t feel, she waited to be taken to see her wounded brother.

The world seemed determined to tell her something this week. Her job was likely to end in the next few months and her boyfriend was… well, he wasn’t much of a boyfriend, after all. So maybe she didn’t have as many reasons to stay in Waco as she’d thought.

Maybe it was time to get her priorities straight like her grandmother had advised. Maybe the time had come to consider going home.

* * *

Odetta Flynn stirred her coffee, staring out the kitchen window, her mind working feverishly. If she couldn’t even persuade her own grandchildren to return to Chance, what prospects for survival did her hometown have?

“Well?” Harley Flynn filled his cup from the coffeemaker and crossed to where his wife stood. “Any luck with that stubborn granddaughter of yours?”

“Mine? That girl is pure hardheaded Flynn.”

“I’m the hardheaded one?” Her husband of fifty-three years chuckled and leaned over to give her a quick kiss on the cheek. “You still make me laugh, Odie, you know it? That’s why I’ve kept you around for so long.”

“Who’s kept who around?” Odetta replied, gifting Harley with a smile. “Don’t you worry about our Allie. She’ll do the right thing. I could hear it in her voice.”

“In that case, maybe she is pure Flynn,” Harley said with a wink. “I know I can never resist your wheedling.”

“Hardly!” Odetta snorted, shaking her head. “Her stubborn streak comes from you, for a fact. But that practical bit, she got that from me.”

“Fair enough,” Harley answered, finishing up the last of his coffee. “If you’re right about her coming home, you’d best be working on a way to convince her to stay once she gets here.”

As if Odetta hadn’t already spent her share of sleepless nights worrying over exactly that challenge.

“I think I have that one figured out. With a little help from our girls, we should manage it just fine.” She rubbed her palm down her husband’s arm, ending with a pat to his hand. “As I told you last night, Papa, saving Chance is going to take more than just bringing Allie home. It’s past time we do whatever we can. We’ve sat back and waited for far too long for the rest of the town to wake up and do something.”

“And now it’s your special mission, is it?” Harley grinned and turned away, stopping to set his empty cup on the end of the counter. “Well, more power to you, woman. If you and Dot can’t revive Chance, then it’s a task beyond anyone’s doing. As for me, I’m headed into town. You need me to bring you anything?”

“No, thanks,” she answered absently, her mind already brooding over the problem at hand.

Unless someone did something—and soon—Chance was in danger of becoming one of those pitiful ghost towns that were no more than a footnote in some dusty old book. Though many of the old mining towns in the Colorado mountains struggled to stay alive as time passed, the real culprit in Chance’s demise could be pinpointed to a single year and a single man. It was the year that Daniel Reilly had used his millions to make sure the big highway detoured around Chance to cross through his family’s property, all but dumping tourists in the lap of their ski resort.

Probably the only halfway smart business decision that useless wastrel had ever made, other than choosing Helen Maxwell as his bride. And even then, he’d only done it out of spite and revenge, not because he was smart enough to see the monetary advantage to the Last Chance Ski Resort.

“Lazy son of a bitch,” Odetta muttered. “May he rest in peace.”

She and her best friend, Dorothy O’Connor, had wrestled with the problem of what to do about their dying town for over a year now. Dot, to her credit, had seen some success in keeping her family in Chance. But after a generation-long exodus of their young people, simply keeping family here wasn’t enough. They needed to find a way to make Chance more attractive to outsiders.

As much as she hated to acknowledge what she needed to do, Odetta accepted that the time had come for more drastic action. She had no choice left but to take off the kid gloves and call in some long overdue favors.

She set down her cup and reached for the telephone, quickly punching in the numbers she hadn’t forgotten, not even after all these years.

“Helen Reilly,” she said into the receiver. “Just tell her it’s Odetta Flynn. She’ll take the call.”

CHAPTER TWO

Allie had never asked to be one of those superwomen who had it all. Deep down she suspected those women were a myth anyway, living only in the pages of the books she loved so much. She’d never asked for the perfect job, the perfect man, the perfect two-point-five children
and
the perfectly clean little house surrounded by a white picket fence. She was practical enough to accept that such a bounty of perfection was way beyond her reach.