he have to wear a collar of shame?” Gabe asked. “He hates it.”
“I might have one of the new soft kind in the truck. It’ll be more comfortable for him.” He rubbed Rufus’s big head and ears, and the dog lolled onto his back, panting.
Jack massaged the dog, enjoying the cool mountain breeze on his face. Despite his problems, he had a good life. New friends like Gabe, old friends like Penny, a healthy son, work he loved. And an environment where God’s grandeur was continually on display.
When Arianna approached, Sammy in her arms, he was surprised to see the warm expression on her face.
He gave her a smile in return, and their eyes linked and stayed for a second longer than was polite. Heat washed over him.
A black PT Cruiser chugged up the road then, breaking the mood. It stopped in front of his place, and a woman stepped out. She looked to be a few years older than Jack and was dressed in black slacks and an old-fashioned white blouse. Her hair was caught back in a tight bun. She marched up to his front door and knocked.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “Looks like Sammy and I have an appointment. Gabe, I’ll dig out one of those collars for Rufus and bring it over later. You going to be home?” He waved a hand toward Gabe’s cabin a short distance down the ranch’s main road.
“Sure thing, we’ll be around all day.”
The nanny pounded on his door again and then returned to her car with visible exasperation. She got in and leaned on the horn.
A drop of rain fell, then another. The clouds that had been coming in clustered over them.
The prospective nanny got out of her car, snapped open a black umbrella and marched toward the cabin’s porch again.
“You said you wanted Mary Poppins,” Arianna murmured, a smile tugging at her mouth.
“So I did,” he said with a sigh.
None of this was going to be as easy as he’d hoped.
* * *
“Thanks for letting me stay with you, Aunt Justine,” Arianna said the next morning as she dodged stacks of magazines and newspapers to get their breakfast dishes to the kitchen sink.
“You’re as welcome as can be,” her aunt said. “I just wish the place were in better shape for visitors.” She looked toward the hallway that led back to the bedrooms. “He won’t let me throw anything away, and his stuff is filling up the whole house.”
“I know how hard you try.” Arianna submerged the dishes in soapy water and started to scrub. “I’m either going to find a job and a place to stay within the week, or I’ll have to move back to Chicago.”
“Don’t do that!” Aunt Justine sounded horrified. “You should have settled down here like your sister did, not in that soulless city, when your parents moved overseas. I never could figure out why you chose to live there. I thought you loved it here, especially when you spent that one whole summer here during college.”
Arianna rinsed the dishes and dunked a couple of dirty pans from the counter into the soapy water. It was good that Aunt Justine had never figured out the reason for Arianna’s abrupt departure. Almost no one had known about the mistakes that had led to a surprise pregnancy. That was what had allowed Chloe to adopt Arianna’s baby with no one the wiser.
Including Jack. Arianna sighed. She’d been adamantly opposed to Chloe keeping the truth from her husband. But Chloe had been as embarrassed about her infertility as Arianna was about her out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Somehow, adopting her sister’s baby, and having people know it, made everything worse for Chloe.
And given how sensitive Chloe was, Arianna had given in. It was what she’d been raised to do. Take care of your sister. She’s not strong like you. Don’t upset her.
She pushed thoughts of her younger days out of her mind and asked Aunt Justine about her vegetable garden and the cat that had shown up on the doorstep yesterday. They had a nice chat while Arianna finished the washing up.
“There. That’s better, at least.” Arianna surveyed the empty sink and two feet of clear counter space with satisfaction. “Now, I’m going to go out and sell myself as an art therapist.”
“Thank you for cleaning up, hon. I’ll keep praying for a wonderful job for you.”
Arianna strolled through the town of Esperanza Springs, inhaling the fresh scents of pine and sage that blew down from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, watching a black-and-white magpie land on someone’s fence post to scold the pedestrians walking by. From the Mountain High Bakery, the cinnamon scent was so powerful that Arianna was sorely tempted to pop in for a scone, even though she’d just had breakfast. But she didn’t need to outgrow her summer clothes, so she walked resolutely past the bakery. She waved at the woman washing the windows of La Boca Feliz Mexican restaurant, and peeked in the hardware store window, then focused on her destination: the children’s summer program housed in a local church. She was hoping they’d jump at the chance to have a real art therapist visit with the kids each week for the rest of the summer.
It had been a long shot, and she’d known it, but she was still disappointed at the firm no she got. Disappointed enough that she stopped in the town park to look out at the mountains, breathe in the fresh air and regroup.
She hadn’t expected to land in a bed of roses when she’d come back to Esperanza Springs. She’d known the market for art therapists would be tiny; this town was about the basics, not the luxuries, and art therapy was considered a luxury by most of the folks around here.
The exception was up at Redemption Ranch. Penny and her staff were forward thinking; they knew that it took various types of therapy to reach veterans, to help them work through PTSD and other mental health issues related to their wartime service.
Maybe she could talk Penny into giving her more work than just the single class per week that she’d offered. And maybe one of the cabins was empty. If she could live rent-free...
It was another long shot, but at least it was worth trying. For the chance to live near her son, it was definitely worth a try. None of her attempts to put the past behind her and get on with her life had worked, so she hoped being near Sammy would help to settle her soul. That was the real reason she’d come back to Colorado.
Although, if Jack found out the truth, he’d be furious. Understandably so. She and Chloe should never have kept something so important from him.
What if he got angry enough to keep her away from Sammy? Could he do that? Would he?
And what about Sammy, when he got old enough to wonder about his adoption and his birth parents?
She shook her head to try to shake off the circling thoughts and tuned back in to the world around her.
“That poor little thing,” a woman was saying. She was on a bench behind Arianna, facing the playground. “They have no idea where he came from.”
Idly, Arianna turned to see who the ladies were talking about.
And then she sucked in a breath. There was Sammy on the playground, just a few feet away from the women, toddling from the slide to the climbing structure, where a set of chimes was available for the kids to bang
