okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said when it ended, straightening. “Getting crowded in there, is all.”
She gathered the rest of the towels to stuff in the tiny linen closet in the hall; Cash stepped aside, but the space was too cramped for them not to invade each other’s personal spaces. Especially as between them they took up enough space for at least four average-size people. Cash was all hard and lean where Lee had been more on the marshmallow side, but still, there was a lot of man there.
A lot.
The towels crammed into the closet, Emma started back toward the living room. Silently, Cash followed her, ducking into the kitchen to retrieve his jacket, his face creased into a scowl when he came back out.
“I didn’t ask Lee to put me up on some kind of pedestal, Emma. God knows I didn’t deserve to be on one. But if listening to him talk about me got up your nose, then maybe you should’ve said something instead of staying silent for so long. Or does your thing about the truth only work one way?”
As Emma stood with her mouth open, Cash hunched into his jacket and said his goodbyes to Annie, whose only reply was a waved paintbrush over her shoulder. Then he faced Emma again, his eyes all sharp. “That it?”
“I think so, yes. No, wait,” she said the second he got through the door. “There’s one more thing.”
“And what’s that?” he said, still scowling.
“After Dwight went into the home, Lee took him a copy of your first CD.”
Cash actually flinched. “Now why on earth would he have done that? Considering Dwight destroyed my first guitar.”
Emma laid a hand on her belly as old memories, old hurts, darkened his eyes. “I know, Lee told me—”
“Millie Scott gave it to me,” he said to no one in particular, palming the porch post. “I was eleven, twelve, something like that. It’d been her son’s before he moved away. Gave me all his how-to-play books, too. Took the better part of the summer to get the hang of it.”
With a short, dry laugh, he looked back at Emma. “I was so bad when I started, I’d play in the barn so nobody’d hear me. Except one day Dad did.” The glimpse of humor vanished. “God knows I’d seen him mad plenty by then, but that was nothing compared with that time. You’d thought he found me …” His face reddened. “Well, I suppose you can fill in the blanks on that one.
“Anyway, he grabbed the guitar, told me to git. Later I found it smashed to pieces in one of the garbage cans. Took another two years before I could buy another one—Mama’d slip me a couple of dollars every week from the grocery money. Bought it one of the rare times she and I went to Santa Fe by ourselves.” His mouth stretched. “My first Fender.”
“That the one you hid at Lee’s?”
“Yep. I think the old man knew. Or at least suspected. Because whenever he felt the need to get in a dig? He brought up how bad I was. That who’d ever want to listen to me, anyway? Cows and horses, maybe, but that was it.” His gaze narrowed. “So why on earth would Lee give him my album?”
“Because that wasn’t the same man who destroyed your first guitar! Or got off on belittling you. Mr. Cochran,” she said when he turned away, shaking his head, “you’re not listening—the drugs, the treatment … they banished the monster who’d lived inside your father all those years! Or at least subdued it. And the man left behind, the real man who’d been there along … he listened to the whole album straight through, tears running down his face.”
Her arms crossed against the chill, Emma stepped closer, half tempted to smooth a hand across those hard, tense shoulders, half tempted to cuff the back of Cash’s head. “Believe me or not, it’s no skin off my nose … but your father died a humbled man. And as proud of you as he could have possibly been. I heard him say it myself more times than I can count. He never expected you to love him again, but at the end of his life he loved you more than he could say.”
Silence shrilled between them for a long moment before Cash said, “Just not enough to let me know.”
“Hey. You wanted answers? These are the only ones I’ve got.”
Another second or two of that hard, unrelenting gaze preceded his stalking to his SUV. After much door-yanking and slamming, he gunned the car out of the drive, mud spraying in a roostertail of epic proportions.
Zoey came onto the porch, snuggling up against Emma’s hip. “What was that all about?”
Good question, Emma thought on a sigh, fingering her daughter’s soft, tangled hair. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”
Although what was there to figure out? she mused as they went back inside. Wasn’t like she’d ever see Cash Cochran again. And thank God for small favors.
Because some aggravations, a body does not need.
Chapter Three
Still breathing hard fifteen minutes later, Cash stomped through the front door to the secluded adobe on the other side of Tierra Rosa he’d impulsively bought a few months before, when coming home had—for whatever reason—seemed like a good idea. When, despite how screwed up his past had been, at least it’d been simple.
Or so he’d thought.
Stacks of still-unpacked boxes silently jeered as he strode toward the recently remodeled, no-frills kitchen and a cold Coke; seconds later he stood on the deck off the dining room, overlooking the village tucked up in the valley below.
He took a swig of the soda, forcing air in and out of his lungs until the brisk spring breeze siphoned off at least enough of the tension so he could think. Sort through the hundred thoughts and images ping-ponging inside his head, some real, others imagined: of Lee, the last time he’d seen him, his brown eyes shiny when he clapped Cash on the shoulder and wished him well; of his father, crying—crying?!—as he listened to the CD; of the contradiction of compassion and intolerance, of patient reserve and brutal honesty, that was Emma Manning, her steady, funny-colored eyes seared into his brain.
Cash gave his head a hard shake, trying to dislodge the image. Images.
Had he really been looking for answers, or justification for the resentment he’d been hauling around like a worn-out suitcase for the past twenty years? And now that he had those answers … what, exactly, did he intend to do with them?
About them?
About Lee’s request?
Gritting his teeth, Cash parked his butt on the deck railing to lean against a support post, one booted foot on the railing. Now the breeze skimmed his heated face like a mother’s touch. Except instead of soothing, it only further stoked his anger, that by making it impossible for Cash to stay, his father had stolen from him the skies and forests and mountains he’d loved so much.
His home.
His identity, when you got right down to it.
Not that it mattered, really, once his career took off, and Cash had figured he’d be tethered to Nashville for the rest of his days, anyway. Well, except during those
