The Comforts of Home (15 page)

Autumn had packed everything she owned in the back of her car and driven away with her almost-stepmother waving from the porch. There was nothing left for her in Tennessee.

“Five years,” she whispered. “Five years of trying to make a living, of trying to keep body and soul together.” She didn’t want to think about how badly she’d failed at love, at life, even at surviving. And now, she carried the baby from a man she barely knew and had never liked.

He’d said he wanted her, needed her. She’d gotten pregnant before she realized that he was lying. His kind of want and need had nothing to do with love.

Autumn couldn’t take care of herself. How was she ever going to take care of a kid? But she couldn’t end the baby’s life any more than she could end her own. Somehow, deep down inside, she had to believe that things would change.

She knew life would never be easy, but did it have to always be so hard?

DENVER SIMS THOUGHT THE RINGING WAS IN HIS

HEAD for a few times before he realized it was the phone beside his bed. He opened one eye and smiled, realizing he was home in Harmony and not in some hotel between flights. His house on Lone Oak Road was the only place he felt like he could let his guard down. He might have remodeled and had it furnished in Mission-style décor that looked more like it belonged in New Mexico than West Texas, but this place was very much his lair. The place he went when he needed to rest, to hide out.

The house phone sounded again.

With a loud groan, he frowned and climbed out of bed.

Home didn’t have wake-up cal s. Who’d be phoning him before dawn? Claire had promised to try to drop by one night, not at sunup.

“Hel o. This better be important!” he snapped in a voice he hadn’t used since the army.

“Denver, you awake?”

“I wasn’t.” Denver sat on the edge of the bed as he recognized the voice of his best friend and only neighbor within shouting distance. “Is it time for the babies to come, Gabe? Are you on your way to the hospital?”

“No, we’re stil five weeks out,” Gabe answered with a laugh. “But since you’re awake, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“I’m not helping you name the twins.” Denver had thought his friend was an intel igent, talented guy until his wife got pregnant. Gabriel Leary could write a book, and il ustrate it, on how not to be an expectant father. “And I’m not, I repeat not, having a discussion about breast-feeding again. I couldn’t even look at a woman from the neck down for a week after our last talk.”

“Forget that,” Gabe said. “It turns out I don’t have a vote on the breast-feeding question, and after my last suggestion on the names, Liz and her mother both agree I don’t get a vote on that either.”

Denver knew he’d be sorry he asked. “What did you suggest?”

“Wel , after Thing One and Thing Two didn’t go over, I thought Thor and Loki. After that, I was told to stop thinking period. Apparently, my role in this whole thing is sperm donor and nothing more.”

Denver smiled, having a hard time feeling sorry for the luckiest guy he knew. “So, since your job was over more than seven months ago, why are you waking me up today?” Gabe paused a moment as though he were starting to lose faith in his ideas. “I think we should practice a few runs into town. You know, run surveil ance to make sure there is nothing in the way that wil slow us down when labor starts and we’re on our way to the hospital. This time of morning there should be no one on the roads, but just to be on the safe side we could do runs at different times.”

“Gabe, we’re five minutes from town, another five to the hospital. If we start when the contractions start, that’s maybe one or two contractions before we’re there.”

“I read they sometimes start closer together than that.

What if they start three minutes apart? Liz wil have a half dozen before we can get her inside the hospital.” Denver saw that there was no reasoning with the man who’d saved his life in combat more than once. He figured he owed him one. “Why don’t you get a room at the hospital and just leave Liz there the last few weeks?”

“Great idea!” Gabe shouted. “I’l be over to get you in five. We’l go in and see if they have any openings we can book ahead.”

Denver tried to argue, but the phone went dead.

Before he could find his shoes, he heard Gabe’s pickup flying into his drive.

Denver walked outside barefooted and yel ed, “I don’t want any credit for this dumb idea. You’ve already got every Matheson woman including little Saralynn thinking you’re crazy. I don’t want to be guilty by association.” Gabe shrugged. “Maybe it’s not a good idea, but we could ask. What harm could it do to just ask about booking a room?”

An hour later, when Dr. Spencer threatened to cal the sheriff if they didn’t leave, Denver decided to physical y drag Gabe out of the hospital corridor.

“Lets go to the diner and have some breakfast,” he suggested as he took Gabe’s keys.

Gabe nodded as he continued to mumble death threats under his breath. When he climbed in the passenger side of his Jeep, he frowned. “I don’t know what they were getting so excited about. Al I was going to do was canvass the area and see if a few of the older patients might be wil ing to check out a little early to make room.” Denver fought down a laugh. “I think it might have been the term
check out
that upset them. Maybe you should have used
go home
.”

Gabe shook his head. “Touchy people.” He rol ed down the window, ignoring the fact that it was freezing. “I’m not sure that Dr. Spencer is old enough to be a real doc. We’ve both seen more blood in battle than she’l probably ever see. She’s so young I wouldn’t be surprised if she parks a tricycle in the hal way when she makes her rounds. She does have smal hands, though. That could come in handy if the baby . . .”

“I don’t want to know.” Denver shot out of the parking lot.

“How about we make a deal? We don’t talk about anything related to being pregnant or having a baby while we eat.”

“You got it, Lieutenant.”

The years of being a soldier seemed a long way away, but the fact that they had the same shared history would forever bond them as friends. More than friends. Brothers.

Denver tried to help. “If you’re worried about the five minutes it’l take to get to town, how about you and Liz moving over to Winter’s Inn? It would cut the time in half.” Gabe shook his head. “I don’t think I could take sweet old Martha Q for more than a day. I think the last time we ate over there with Hank and Alex, the old lady patted me on the bottom.”

Denver laughed. “She’s interested in you, I guess.”

“No.” Gabe shook his head. “I think she was just testing to see if I was fat enough to eat yet. I swear she was the role model for the witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ For years she made men miserable by marrying one after the other.

Now, she’s fattening them up to eat.”

Denver didn’t argue. “Speaking of man haters, what do you hear from Liz’s sister, Claire?” Denver always tried to work Claire into the conversation when he could without being obvious. He would have liked to talk to Gabe about her, but Claire wanted their relationship kept secret from her family, and half the town was either part Matheson or married to one. As far as the Matheson family knew, he was just Gabe’s friend who came to dinner now and then at the ranch house. They al seemed to like him, but Denver wouldn’t be surprised if Alex, a Matheson by marriage, hadn’t had a background check run on him. Alex Matheson was the best sheriff he’d ever seen. Little got past her.

“From what I hear from Liz’s mom, Claire is home working like crazy,” Gabe said, between tel ing Denver how to drive. “Only comes down every night to eat dinner with Saralynn and help her with her homework. Then by nine she’s back working. I heard her last painting was of a businessman face down in the mud with the shadow of a plane over him. The caption read: FASTEN YOUR SEAT

BELT, PLEASE. Her agent says she’l get twenty or thirty thousand for it. She’s sketching out one with a guy lying dead in a parking lot. Huge black crows are pul ing bites off him. She’s cal ing it
Picnic in the Park
. You might be careful, Denver. I swear this new guy in the painting looks a bit like you.”

Denver frowned.

Gabe didn’t seem to notice. “Claire’s getting richer every day and more of a recluse. If her agent didn’t make her travel, I swear she’d never leave the house. She tolerates me, but it’s obvious that woman doesn’t like people and hates al males. Liz says her sister was never boy-crazy as a teenager, but when she came home after her marriage broke up, she’d changed inside. Like something had died and would never return.”

“Look who’s talking, Gabe. Before you met Liz you lived around here five years without more than a handful of people speaking to you.”

They reached the diner and got out. Neither seemed to notice the wind that almost knocked them down. They’d lived on the plains long enough to ignore wind.

As always, Gabe picked a back booth and the two talked about their army days and how different life was now for them. Gabe always asked about Denver’s job, which he considered cushy: flying around the country, keeping an eye out for trouble on planes.

Denver told him about a drunk who started yel ing one night on a flight out of Chicago. He wanted the stewardess to sit on him to hold him down so he wouldn’t float off the plane when they lost gravity. A steward appeared and took over the job, ignoring the drunk’s complaining.

On the way back to the farm, Gabe talked about his work, but Denver didn’t understand much. The only graphic novels Denver had read were Gabe’s work. He knew his friend was good. Money hadn’t been an issue when he’d built a house overlooking the canyon. It wasn’t big, but the views were outstanding and he and Liz lived in every room.

Denver shared Gabe’s confusion over people who built rooms in a home that they never went in. Maybe their feelings came from spending so many years in tents where they thought they had luxury if their feet didn’t hang out. Life in Harmony seemed not only a world away from what they once were, but a lifetime as wel . The two soldiers who once thought only of staying alive were now talking about diapers.

But with Gabe and Liz, life was blessed and their lifestyle was reflected even in their home. Their house was open, flowing from his study into a living area and an open kitchen. Denver got the feeling they couldn’t stand to be separated by even the wal s. Liz could stand in the kitchen and watch him work and he could watch over her when she slept on the couch or in the sunroom. Denver caught himself feeling a little jealous of that kind of love.

The house phone was ringing as he waved good-bye to Gabe and stepped back inside. For once he knew it wasn’t Gabe.

Pirate, the mangy dog who’d seemed to come with the house he bought, appeared from the hal way.

“You could have answered it,” Denver said as he rushed past. “Maybe taken a message.”

The dog didn’t look like he cared.

Denver grabbed the phone. “Sims here,” he said, reaching for a pen to write down the time of his next flight.

He wasn’t due to work for two more days, but he usual y took shifts when they came along so he could build up comp time.

There was a pause before a woman’s voice whispered,

“Denver?”

He felt his heart slow. “I’m here, Claire.”

“I saw you with Gabe at the diner on my way home from taking Saralynn to school. Is everything al right with my sister? I wanted to cal her, but I was afraid that if everything is fine, I’d wake her this early, and if it’s not she’d be too busy to talk.”

“Everything is fine. How about I promise to cal the minute something does happen?” He figured Liz would cal her sister when it happened, but she and Claire were not close. Maybe because there were too many years between them, or maybe just because they were very different people.

“I’d appreciate it,” she whispered, tel ing Denver she was probably cal ing from the Matheson Ranch. With al the women living in that place he was surprised she’d found an empty room.

“It’s Thursday,” Denver, said trying to keep her on the line. “Doesn’t Hank take Saralynn to school?” He made a point to remember every detail about Claire and her family.

“Usual y, but he and Alex were cal ed in early. There’s a dawn meeting at the courthouse about a disaster plan. This year everyone wants to be prepared if a tornado comes our way. Alex as sheriff and Hank as volunteer fire chief both had to be there.”