Читать книгу: «A Ring And A Rainbow»

Chapter One

In life there were supposed to be beginnings and endings, and when Claire Dent looked back over her thirty-four years in Lost Falls, Wyoming, she realized she’d had very few of either. Her life was like a story with a great big middle. It didn’t have a particularly fascinating beginning, and it didn’t appear to be heading toward any remarkable ending.

Today, however, changes were in the air.

If things went as she expected, she’d finally put “the end” on one of the most painful chapters of her life—and she’d be happy to do so.

She yanked open the oven door. She let 350 degrees of dry heat smash her in the face as she gazed in at the chicken pot pie. The gravy bubbled around the edges of a perfectly browned crust, and the scent was heavenly.

Heavenly.

Huh. What an ironic comparison to have, especially today. Claire had lived next door to Ella Starnes for as long as she could remember. The woman had been a paradox. As outspoken as a candidate on a bipartisan ballot, as charitable as a saint. It didn’t seem possible that she was gone. She’d just slipped away in her sleep two nights ago. Of course, if there was a woman to make the heavens sing, it would be Ella. She was probably up there now, orchestrating some kind of plan.

Ella’s oldest daughter, Beth, had called this morning, to tell Claire all the kids were coming home. There were five altogether. Beth, and her sisters—Mindy, Courtney, Lynda—and her brother, Hunter. Every one of the girls had married and moved away, yet they all came home at least once a year, sometimes more often. Claire knew their lives as intimately as she knew her own.

Hunter, on the other hand, was a different story. He hadn’t found his way home in twelve years, and rumor had it that he was single, filthy rich and managing a reputation that alternated between reckless and restrained. Hunter was a venture capitalist, and Ella joked that he lost everyone’s money but his own.

Claire could have cared less—but the idea of Hunter coming back rankled.

He was the last man on the face of the earth she ever wanted to see. Not for all these years, and not after all these years—and certainly not when she was messed up with grief about his mother. They’d parted ways when she refused to wait any longer for the wedding he’d promised her, and he insisted on going off to make something of himself. Their breakup was one notch short of ugly, but Claire had gone on about her business and held her head up—even though she knew everyone in town talked about how he’d jilted her.

Jilted, as in never a ring, only a promise.

Still, she had an obligation to the family, and as a good neighbor, she’d see that obligation through. She’d take the pot pie over and leave it on the table so they could have a hot meal when they got in. She’d purposely avoid Hunter, even as she made him aware of her presence.

She’d let him know that here, in Lost Falls, people kept their promises to one another. That they ate pot pies, not beef Wellington and parsleyed potatoes.

It would be enough. For today.

Tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, he’d discover that she’d gotten him out of her system. He’d see firsthand that she wasn’t impressed with him, or what he’d done with his life—or how much money he’d made. By the time it was all said and done she’d make sure he knew that she didn’t regret staying in Lost Falls, not for one minute. In fact, by the time she was done, she’d make him wonder why he’d ever left.

Claire took out the pot pie and glanced out the side window. The kitchen windows of the Dent and Starnes homes faced each other, separated by a shared blacktop driveway. No one was home yet; the driveway was conspicuously empty.

She stepped outside, crossed the driveway, then hurried up the back-porch steps. Hesitating at the door, she fumbled with her key and balanced the hot dish. Ella’s back-door lock had a personality all its own, and Claire had long ago learned to jiggle the key and pull it back before turning it. The lock turned, the hinges creaked and the door swung open.

Claire tiptoed in. Even though she’d been treated like part of the family for most of her life, stepping into the eerie, empty silence today made her feel like an intruder. Ella’s coffee cup was beside the sink where she’d left it, and her favorite sweater hung over the back of a chair. Her reading glasses, bows crossed atop the weekly newspaper, still sat on the kitchen table, just as if she’d been reading and had left the room for her afternoon nap.

Yesterday, when the sheriff had called her over, Claire had debated putting some of the things away, but she’d chosen not to. It would be good for Ella’s kids to feel their mother’s presence in the house, just as she had. She knew from experience how hard it was to lose your mother, and she didn’t want to take one thing away from them. Not one. No, she’d leave everything the way it was, and then they could do as they wished.

Ella’s medicine bottles—including the one Claire had just had refilled for her on Friday—were clustered in the center of the table, looking more like condiments than prescriptions. Moving a couple of them back, Claire put the chicken pot pie on the table before slipping off the oven mitt. The writing pad and pencils were in the junk drawer, upper left, so she turned away to get them. Tearing off a sheet of paper from the lined tablet, she fished out a pencil.

The pencil was an old red one from the station. Starnes’s Oil and Fuel. Let Us Take You Places. A rueful smile lifted the corner of her mouth. Huh. The only place it had ever taken her was to hell and back. She’d wasted half of her youth watching Hunter change oil filters, pump gas and wash windshields. She’d leaned over the hoods of the cars he’d tinkered with and listened to his dreams.

And never, not in a million years, had she ever considered that his dreams wouldn’t include her. Nobody else had, either. Maybe that’s why it had come as such a shock to both families when they’d broken up. It was the dreams he’d nurtured in college that had done them in. She’d had no idea someone’s dreams could be that big, that consuming.

“Smells good. Very good.”

Claire startled, as if she’d been shot from the sheer impact of the familiar honeyed voice. Her shoulder slammed against the wall, the pencil skittered from her grasp and rolled across the countertop.

“I…” Her explanation, as well as any rational thought, fled.

Hunter stood there in the doorway, barefoot, shirtless, the waist of his jeans sagging in a half-moon below his belly button. He had a white cotton T-shirt bunched in his fist, and his pose was edgy, as if he’d been ready to light into her.

Claire’s heart hammered, her mouth went dry. His untimely entrance vaporized all the coolly polite greetings she had rehearsed. “You scared me,” she accused.

“Didn’t mean to.” Hunter’s burning gaze skimmed her, then dropped to the toes of her shoes and slowly worked its way back up.

Claire didn’t wilt under the inspection and, strangely, she wasn’t offended, either. She stared right back, returning the favor in full.

Damn him. He was everything she remembered and more. He was ruggedly handsome, and so masculine that, if measured, the virility quotient would likely pop the top off the charts. Why couldn’t the man be stoop shouldered and paunchy, with glasses and a receding hairline?

But, no, that would have been too easy. No, he had to come back as a six-foot-four hardbody. At thirty-five, Hunter Starnes could live up to any trendy description and still manage to be a man’s man. He was everything that filled her dreams and sleepless nights. Everything that haunted and teased her.

It surprised her a bit that he’d filled out, into the epitome of strength and resilience. He’d never looked like this at twenty.

The last decade had given him a sexier, bolder look. His face was wider, squarer. His forehead was broad and smooth, while smile lines bracketed his mouth, sculpting age and experience into the tanned expanse of his cheeks. The blunt curve of his jaw—and the sawed-off, notched chin—were sooty from a day’s growth of stubble. It was the sort of look most women found mysteriously intoxicating—the look of a bad boy waiting to be tamed.

Most women. Not her.

And then there was his hair. Dark. Tousled. Sparse on the sides and decadently spiked. Clipped to precision, and trimmed to arch so perfectly over the flat shells of his ears that it made Claire realize he groomed his image just as much as he did his career.

His hazel eyes, which had always been flirty and fun, had subtly changed. Now a shrewd quality filled their depths, putting his expression somewhere between piercing and ponderous. It scared her a little and made her feel inexplicably vulnerable, as if he could see right down to the bottom of her soul. She saw a grief there, too…a grief that, this time around, she didn’t know how to handle.

He still had the whitest, straightest teeth—and, she guessed, a mouth that occasionally twitched when he teased. A mouth she once knew as soft and sexy and seductively sinful when he kissed. A mouth that had once taught her about French kisses and hickies and the delicious rapid-fire rapport between men and women. Now his mouth was solemn, sad, the corners turned down.

If there was one compromise to perfection, it had to be his nose, she silently conceded, gratified to at least find something physically wrong with his looks. It still leaned a little off-kilter, his reward for playing smash-mouth basketball his senior year in high school.

“I meant it. Didn’t mean to scare you, but—” he lifted an eyebrow as well as an apologetic shoulder as he sauntered into the room, pausing at the edge of the kitchen table “—I wasn’t expecting the girls yet, so I figured I ought to check out the noise, make sure no one broke in. I was ready to take you out.”

“Sorry. I should have knocked,” she said stiffly, straightening. Funny, the last time he’d suggested taking her out it had been for a date. “I’m so used to just coming over. But I wanted to leave dinner for your family, so it would be here when they got in.” She didn’t want him to think she’d made the meal solely for his benefit. She waggled the slip of paper. “I was going to leave a note, Hunter, along with my condolences.”

His gaze narrowed, eyeing the blank sheet of paper as if it was an unsigned sympathy card. The muscle along his jaw tightened. “Thanks.” The single word was rough, husky with unspent grief. “I appreciate it.”

Claire hesitated, swallowing the lump in her throat. If he shed as much as one tear, she’d fall apart—and then she’d fall straight into his arms. “And I—I want you to know I’ll miss your mom a lot.”

He nodded, his eyes shuttering closed for the briefest of moments. His head tipped slightly forward, and then he drew a ragged breath. “Thanks, Claire. But…well…I imagine it was as much of a shock to you as it was to any of us.”

“It was.” Yet Claire knew that in the social scheme of things, she wasn’t deserving of sympathy. She was only the neighbor, not one of the children, not one of the in-laws. Still, Ella Starnes had been like a mother to her.

“I knew, like you probably did, that she hadn’t been feeling well lately, but…” He let the explanation drift.

“I saw her just the day before. Her color was fine, and she seemed better than she’d been all winter. She was even talking about taking a cruise this fall.”

Hunter snorted, and shook his head, as if his mother’s antics would never cease to amaze him. “Up until this last year, she sure knew how to enjoy life,” he grudgingly admitted. “Beth said maybe it’s a blessing, that she went quickly like that. She never would have stood for being sick, or being a burden day in and day out.”

Claire nodded, momentarily thinking how strange it was that they could talk about anything at all, even his mother’s death. “I know. If anything, your mother taught me how to fight back.” He looked at her quickly, making Claire immediately wish she could retract the words. But she couldn’t, so she amended them. “Your mother knew how to take things in stride. She was too feisty to let her arthritis get her down, and too strong willed to have anything but a smile on her face.”

Hunter made a funny little noise in the back of his throat, as if he was choking up and couldn’t risk saying anything.

Instinctively Claire knew he didn’t want to cry, or look weak, in front of her. So she tried to make a joke—as feeble as it was—to give him an out. “Of course, she did have a thing about the driveway,” she said. “She kept telling me that shoveling it was good exercise, that it would keep me young. She bought me a new shovel every fall. I, on the other hand, kept hinting about a snowblower….”

He laughed, hard enough to explain away the red-rimmed, watery eyes. He swiped at them with the back of his hand, as if it was her poor joke that had brought tears to his eyes.

But they both knew better.

Claire longed to give him a hug and tell him she was really, truly sorry. But rational thought warned her that would be a particularly bad idea, given how she felt about him.

So they stood there, grappling with a strained moment of silence. Claire realized she should make some kind of excuse and leave, but couldn’t bring herself to do so. It had been years, what were a few more miserable minutes? Especially if she could share them with Hunter.

“So you caught me,” he said finally, changing the subject as he shook out the T-shirt. “I was about to jump in the shower before the girls and their families got in.” He pulled the shirt over his head, shouldering into the sleeves before yanking down the hem, and stretching it taut against his chest. Hunter’s biceps moved as though he was a day laborer, not a pampered entrepreneur. Claire suspected he probably popped the seams out of his designer suits. “Left my car in the street, so that’s why you probably didn’t notice it. I figured they’d be unloading playpens and high chairs and stuff.”

Regret unexpectedly went zinging through her middle, and she looked away, refusing to let him see the longing she couldn’t control. She was slowly coming to terms with the fact that she’d probably never have a family, never have a child, but some days were more difficult than others.

When she and Hunter were eighteen, and full of hope for the future, they’d impulsively picked out baby names. She wondered if he still remembered. April Michelle for a girl. Tyler Worth for a boy. She’d once written them in all the margins of her spiral-bound notebooks and imagined the beautiful babies they’d have. Now all she had was empty, empty arms.

“My mistake,” she said, forcing a calm into her voice that she didn’t feel. “To tell you the truth, if I’d known you were here, Hunter, I certainly wouldn’t have walked in. I would have stopped one of your sisters in the driveway and handed them the casserole.”

Both of his eyebrows lifted, and he regarded her perceptively. “Still mad, huh?”

She stared at him, considered the blunt question, and reminded herself that maybe she was one lucky woman. She could have married him twelve years ago and been saddled with him for the duration. “Why would I be mad? We haven’t talked in a dozen years. We don’t have anything in common. You have your life in California, I’ve kept mine in Lost Falls. We clearly don’t have anything to say to each other. You’re just one more part of my past.” She held up the key. “Look. Here’s your mother’s house key. I’m sure you’ll want it back.”

His eyes dropped, flicking over the brass key. “Keep it.”

“There’s no reason to keep it. Not now.”

His gaze went hard, penetrating, the green flecks in his eyes fading to bronze. “Mom appreciated everything you did for her, Claire. You were here for her every day when none of the rest of us were. None of us will forget that. No matter what happened between you and me.”

Claire chose to ignore the last sentence. “Your sisters came as often as they could. It was hard for them, living so far from home, and I was happy to fill in when I could. But, your mother, she’s gone now…and…”

Claire tried not to strangle over the words. For herself, for Hunter, for even the awkwardness of the situation. Yet with Ella gone, Claire’s ties to the Starnes family were forever severed.

The sudden, helpless feeling that she was all alone made her shiver with the strangest sense of claustrophobia. She wouldn’t think about the anxiety that had been building in her all day, she wouldn’t even consider it. There were worse things in life than being alone.

Finally, she said, “Experience tells me you’ll want to pull in all the stray keys, Hunter. Or at least change the locks.”

He still didn’t reach for the key, and Claire, left holding it, stared at him.

“You’re as good as family, Claire.”

Claire’s hand dropped slightly. She let the palm of her hand swallow the key and curled her fingers tightly around it. “Blood’s thicker than water, we both know that.”

A second slipped away. His gaze was pinned on her. There wasn’t a hint of sexual suggestion behind his eyes, just a steady evaluation. “You look good, Claire. Really good.”

How could he say something like that, she fumed. How? Why couldn’t he just politely thank her for the blasted pot pie and show her the door?

Tension sizzled, and she insanely thought of the key Benjamin Franklin had threaded on the kite string to conduct a little electrical current. Right now, Hunter Starnes was like that, offering her one fantastic lightning bolt after another. “I also wanted to let you know,” she said evenly, “if you need anything—”

“A truce?”

Claire’s eyelids involuntarily went half-mast, and her heart fluttered. “Don’t.”

“C’mon, Claire. This is ridiculous,” he growled, imperceptibly moving toward her. “We haven’t even said hello. Not a real hello. You’re standing on your side of the room, I’m standing on mine. We both know we aren’t going to take up where we left off, but we can at least be civil.”