and he watched helplessly while Maura comforted her. Judging by the mood swings and the emotional outbursts, apparently he had a hell of a lot to learn about having a nineteen-year-old daughter.
“You’re exhausted, honey. I’m sure you’ve been studying hard for finals.”
“I haven’t been able to sleep much since the lecture,” she admitted, resting her darker head on her mother’s shoulder. He had a feeling the bond between them would survive the secret Maura had never told her daughter. As he saw the two of them together, something sharp and achy twisted in his gut.
He had an almost-grown daughter he suddenly felt responsible for, and he had no idea what he was supposed to do about it.
“Why don’t you take my car home and go back to the house to get some rest,” Maura said. “I’ll catch a ride with your grandmother or with Claire. We can talk more in the morning when we’re both rested and…more calm.”
“I’ll take her home,” Jack offered quietly.
“Thank you, but I wouldn’t want to put you to any more trouble. You’ve done enough by bringing her all this way from Boulder. I’m sure you need to get back to…wherever you came from.”
In a rush to send him on his way, was she? “Actually, I’m planning to stay in town a few days.”
“Why?” she asked, green eyes wide with surprise. “You hate Hope’s Crossing.”
“I just found out I have a daughter. I’m not in any particular hurry to walk back out of her life right away.”
The surprise shifted to something that looked like horror, as if she had never expected him to genuinely want to be part of their daughter’s world on any ongoing basis. Sage, though, lifted her head from her mother’s shoulder and gave him a watery smile. “That’s great. Really great.”
“What do you say we meet for breakfast in the morning? Unless you have to be here at the bookstore first thing.”
Maybe a night’s rest would give them all a little breathing space and offer him, at least, a chance to regain equilibrium, before any deeper discussion about the decisions made in the past and where they would go from here.
“I own the place. I don’t have to punch a clock.”
“Which usually means you’re here from about eight a.m. to ten p.m.” Sage gave her mother a teasing look.
“I can meet for breakfast,” Maura said. “Tomorrow I don’t have anything pressing at the store until midmorning.”
“Perfect. Why don’t we meet at the Center of Hope Café at around eight-thirty? We stopped there to grab a bite at the counter before we walked over here, and I’m happy to say their food is just as good as I remembered.”
“The café? I don’t know if that’s the greatest idea. You might not want to…” she started to say, but her words trailed off.
“Want to what?” he asked.
She seemed to reconsider the subject of any objection on his part. “No. On second thought, sure. Eight-thirty at the café should work just fine.”
“Okay. I’ll see you then. Shall we go, Sage?”
“Yeah.” She pressed her cheek to her mother’s. “I’m still furious you didn’t tell me about my father. I probably will be for a while. But I still love you and I will forever and ever.”
“Back at you,” Maura said, a catch in her voice that she quickly cleared away.
“Do you think she’ll be okay?” Sage asked him after they walked through the bookstore and the lightly falling snow to the SUV, which he had rented what seemed a lifetime ago at the Denver airport before his lecture.
“You would know that better than I do.”
“I thought I knew my mother. We’re best friends. I still can’t believe she would keep this huge secret from me.”
He wondered at Maura’s reasons for that. Why didn’t she tell Sage? Why didn’t she tell him? Surely in the years since he’d left, she could have found some way to tell him about his child.
The idea of it was still overwhelming as hell.
“You’ll have to give me directions to your place,” he said after she fastened her seat belt.
“Oh. Right. We live on Mountain Laurel Road. Do you remember where that is?”
“I think so.” If he remembered correctly, it was just past Sweet Laurel Falls, one of his favorite places in town. The falls had been one of their secret rendezvous points. Why he should remember that right now, he had no idea. “I know the general direction, anyway. Be sure to tell me if I start to head off course.”
Traffic was busier than he expected as he drove through Hope’s Crossing with the wipers beating back the falling snow. He hardly recognized the downtown. When he had lived here, many of these storefronts had been empty or had housed businesses that barely survived on the margin. Now trendy restaurants, bustling bars catering to tourists and boutiques with elegant holiday window displays seemed to jostle for space.
Some of the historic buildings were still there, but he could see new buildings as well. Much to his surprise, some faction in town had apparently made an effort to keep the town’s historic flavor, even among the new developments. Instead of a modern hodgepodge of architectural styles that would be jarring and unpleasant with the mountain grandeur surrounding the town, it looked as if restrictions had been enacted to require strict adherence to building codes. Even in the few strip-mall-type developments they passed with pizza places, frozen yogurt shops and fast-food places that might appeal to tourists, the buildings had cedar-shake roofs and no flashy signage to jar with the setting.
As he drove up the hill toward Mountain Laurel Road, the surroundings seemed more familiar, even after twenty years. In his day, this area of town had been called Old Hope, a neighborhood of smaller, wood-framed houses, some of them dating back to the town’s past as a rough and rugged mining town. A few of the houses had been torn down and small condominium units or more modern homes built in their place, and many had obviously been rehabbed.
He could easily tell which were vacation homes—they invariably had some sort of kitschy decoration on the exterior, like a crossed pair of old wooden skis or snowshoes, or some other kind of cabin-chic decoration. He saw a couple of carved wooden bears and even a wooden moose head on a garage.
“Turn here,” Sage said. “Our house is the small brick-and-tan house on the right, three houses from the corner.”
From what he had just seen in town, Maura ran a prosperous business in Hope’s Crossing. According to the information he had gleaned from Sage over the past few days, she had been married for five years to Chris Parker, frontman for Pendragon, a band even Jack had heard of before.
She must have received a healthy alimony and child support settlement from the guy when their marriage broke up. So why was she living in a small Craftsman bungalow that looked as though it couldn’t be more than nine hundred square feet?
Despite its small size, the house appeared cozy and warm nestled here in the mountains. Snow drifted down to settle
