tatters, determined to build a decent life for herself and her baby someplace where people weren’t always expecting the worst of her.
Not that she hadn’t given them cause to think poorly of her. She’d been rebellious from the moment she’d discovered that breaking the rules was a whole lot more fun than following them. She’d given her mother fits from the time she’d been a two-year-old whose favorite word was no, right on through her teens when she hadn’t said no nearly enough.
If there was trouble in town, Cassie was the first person everyone looked to as ringleader. Her pregnancy hadn’t surprised a single soul. Rather than endure the knowing looks and clucking remarks, rather than ask her mother to do the same, she’d simply fled, stopping in the first town where she’d spotted a Help Wanted sign in a diner window.
In the years since, she had made only rare trips back to visit her mother, and she’d never once asked about Cole or his family. If her mother suspected who Jake’s father was, she’d never admitted it. The topic was off-limits to this day. Jake was Cassie’s alone. Most of the time she was justifiably proud of the job she’d done raising him. She resented Joshua’s implication that she wasn’t up to the task on her own.
“Are you saying Jake wouldn’t have done this if his father had been around?” she asked, an edge to her voice. “What could he have done that I haven’t? I’ve taught Jake that it’s wrong to steal. The message has been reinforced in Sunday school. And, believe me, he will be punished for this. He may well be grounded till he’s twenty-one.”
Joshua held up his hand. “I wasn’t criticizing you. Kids get into trouble even with the best parents around, but with boys especially, they need a solid male role model.”
Cassie didn’t especially want her son following in Cole Davis’s footsteps. There had to be better role models around. One was sitting right in front of her.
“He has you, Joshua,” she pointed out. “Since you’ve been coming around the diner, he’s spent a lot of time with you. He looks up to you. If anyone represents authority and law and order, you do. Did that help?”
“Point taken.” He regarded her with concern. “Are you going to take that trip Jake was talking about? Obviously, it’s something that he really cares about.”
“I don’t see how we can.”
“If it’s a matter of money, the way the boy said, it could be worked out,” he said. “Earlene and I—”
“I’m not taking money from you,” she said fiercely. “Or from Earlene. She’s done enough for me.”
“I think you should consider it,” Joshua said slowly. His expression turned uneasy. “Look, Earlene would have my hide if she knew I was suggesting this, but I think you might want to give some thought to staying in Winding River when you do go back there.” He said it as if their going was a done deal despite her expressed reluctance.
Cassie stared at him in shock. “Are you throwing us out of town?”
Joshua chuckled. “Nothing that dramatic. I was just thinking that it might be good for Jake to have more family around, more people to look out for him, lend a little extra stability to his life. It would be a help to you and maybe keep him out of mischief. This latest escapade can’t be dismissed as easily as some of the others. Sometimes even kids need a fresh start. I’ve heard you tell Earlene yourself that he gives his teachers fits at school. Maybe a whole new environment where no one’s expecting the worst would help him settle down. Better to get him in hand now than when he hits his teens and the trouble can get a whole lot more serious.”
“I know,” Cassie said, defeated. Nobody knew better than she did about fresh starts and living down past mistakes. Even so, it wasn’t as easy as Joshua made it sound. She didn’t bother to explain that her mother was all the family they’d have in Winding River and that friends there were few and far between. She had a stronger support system right here. Unfortunately, Joshua clearly didn’t want to hear that.
“I’ll think about it,” she said eventually. “I promise.”
But going home for a few days for a class reunion was one thing. Going back to live in the same town where Cole Davis and his father ruled was quite another.
Unfortunately, though, it sounded as if circumstances—and the well-intentioned sheriff—might not be giving her much choice.
“Blast it all, boy, I ain’t getting any younger,” Frank Davis grumbled over the eggs, ham and grits that were likely to do him in. “Who’s going to run this ranch when I die?”
Cole put down his fork and sighed. He and his father had had this same discussion at least a thousand times in the past eight years.
“I thought that was why I was here,” Cole said. “So you could go to your eternal rest knowing that the ranch was still in Davis hands.”
His father waved off the comment. “Your heart’s not in this place. I might as well admit it. It could fall down around us for all the attention you pay it. You spend half the night locked away in that office of yours with all that fancy computer equipment. For the life of me I can’t figure what’s so all-fired fascinating about staring at a screen with a bunch of gobbledy-gook on it.”
“Last year that gobbledy-gook earned three times as much as this ranch,” Cole pointed out, knowing even as he spoke that his father wouldn’t be impressed. If it didn’t have to do with cattle or land, Frank Davis didn’t trust it. Cole had given up expecting his father to be proud of his accomplishments in the high-tech world. He got higher praise when he negotiated top dollar for their cattle at market.
“All I have to say is, if I’d known then what I know now, I wouldn’t have been so quick to break up you and that Collins girl. Maybe you’d have been settled down by now. Maybe you would have a little respect for this ranch your great-grandfather started.”
Cole was not about to head off down that particular path. Any discussion of Cassie was doomed. He remembered all too clearly what had happened the minute his father had learned that the two of them were getting close. He had packed up Cole’s things and shipped him off to school weeks before the start of his junior year.
To his everlasting regret, there hadn’t been a thing Cole could do about it. At that point he’d wanted his college diploma too much to risk his father’s wrath. That diploma had been his ticket away from ranching. He’d sent a note to Cassie explaining and begging for her understanding. Her reply had been curt. She’d told him it didn’t matter, that he could do whatever suited him. She intended to get on with her life.
Ironically, the ink had barely been dry on his diploma when his father had suffered a heart attack and pleaded with him to return home. Now here he was, spending his days running the ranch he hated and his nights working on the computer programming he loved. It wasn’t as awful as it could have been. The reality was he could design his computer programs anywhere, even in a town where he had to dodge old memories at every turn.
By the time he’d come back to Winding River, Cassie Collins had been gone, and no one was saying where. Up until then her mother had been kind to him, standing in for the mother he’d lost at an early age. But when he’d gone to see her on his return, Edna Collins had slammed the door in his face. He hadn’t understood why, but he hadn’t forced the issue.
Over the years he’d heard Cassie’s name mentioned, usually in connection with some wild, reckless stunt that had
