son. I’ll be glad when you sell this place and—”
“Don’t count on it,” Tanner said slowly, feeling the burn of old wounds and the need to cut at the woman who had stolen his life, his dreams. He could have tried to fill himself with other dreams, another woman, but life hadn’t turned that way for Tanner Bennett. Within himself, in the deep dark certain truth of his life, he knew that he’d have to find peace as his mother had.
Her eyes widened, sunlight glistening on her lashes. “But at the hardware store, they said that you and your sisters would probably sell. It’s a wonderful house with a few acres. I’d buy it myself, if I could afford it—just because I want to hold Anna close—”
“You think I don’t want to hold my mother close?” he demanded curtly. Tanner didn’t like thinking about another family in Anna’s home, or on her land. He wasn’t ready to let her go yet, the house still filled with her scent and memories squeezing him too hard to move on. He’d come to the funeral and with his sisters sat in Anna’s house later, a part of their lives torn away by death, each feeling guilty for not visiting more. Agreeing to temporarily leave Anna’s home as it was, they each went back to their lives far away.
Now Tanner had come back, needing to find peace with his mother’s passing, and with his life. He remembered all they didn’t have, all that they did have because of Anna’s hard work and her endless patience and love. “She should have had more. Life was too hard for her.”
Gwyneth’s hazel eyes softened, drifting over Anna’s house snuggled into shady trees, herbs and flower beds. “You were there for her, and Kylie and Miranda. Her children were her life.”
“She worked too hard.” Tanner noted the bitterness in his tone, the sharp echo of pain in his heart. A widow, bearing the hardships of raising her family, Anna never wavered in helping others and always with a tender smile.
Because the tilt of Gwyneth’s head as she studied him brought back a sweet memory, he brushed his thumb across the corner of her mouth. He noted the fine pink surface, void of lipstick. How long had he wanted her? Since he was eighteen and she was fourteen? Or years before that, when she’d come crying from Leather’s jibes into his mother’s arms?
“So how’s it going, Gwynnie?” he asked to taunt the woman who had just paled at his touch and to derail the sweet memories before that fateful wedding night.
She shivered with anger, her eyes biting at him. “If you bring a hussy into Anna’s house, I’ll be all over you.”
“My, my, my,” he drawled, and grinned at her, pleased that he could rev her so easily, this woman who had torn apart his young dreams. Young Gwyneth had been sweet and retiring and this one wasn’t. “You certainly have a high opinion of me.”
She impatiently ran her hand through her short hair, and he remembered his fingers wrapped deep in the silky sunlight of her long hair. Clearly trying to maintain control, Gwyneth slashed a dark look up at him. “I mean it, Tanner. You bring a woman into Anna’s house and she wouldn’t like that.”
“A woman? Like a woman in my bed? All hot and bothered and—” He couldn’t resist teasing Gwyneth, or was he? That night, long ago, had ripped away part of him. At first he’d tried to make love with other women, and he’d tried to make relationships work—but somehow he couldn’t forget that night.
“You know what I mean about women,” she shot back at him, narrowing her sight on the earring in his ear as though it marked him as “sinner” and “lech.” “You’ve probably… I’ve heard about sailors in port…how they—”
“Yes?” he drawled, really enjoying Gwyneth’s obvious impression of his years away from Freedom Valley.
The quick color moving up her cheeks pleased him. He lifted an eyebrow, fascinated with the woman scowling up at him. Years ago, Gwyneth was little more than a sweet shadow, a girl on the cusp of being a woman—fragile, quiet, uncertain and yet just as fascinating with her green-brown eyes, her cupid’s-bow mouth, those dimples in her cheeks. He ran his hand across her hair, riffling the short strands. “You look good with short hair.”
He took in the length of her fit, athletic body. Gwyneth worked hard and the muscles were smoothly defined on her arms and legs. She had the look of a strong earthy, sensual woman who could take as well as give…not the kind to lie quiet beneath a man. Tanner pushed down that bit of nudging lust for his ex-wife. “Goes with the rest of you.”
She flushed and looked away, and came back with a haughty “It’s practical. A gentleman would put on a shirt while holding a discussion with a lady.”
“Don’t count on manners from me, Gwyneth Bennett,” he said slowly, meaning it. Once again, he remembered her expression as he walked toward her on their wedding night—her eyes had skimmed his chest in that same fearful way…and she’d run away.
Gwyneth had taken his pride and his dreams that night, and now she deserved nothing.
Her indrawn breath hissed in the sweetly scented morning and she paled. “And don’t you dare turn this into a boy’s clubhouse with all your old buddies. They’re all here or come back periodically, all your old high school football and sports buddies—Gabriel Deerhorn, though he keeps to his mountains most of the time—Michael Cusack, York, Frazier, and the rest of your swaggering Bachelor Club! Any beer and babe parties in Anna’s house and I’ll call any wives attached to them. If they’re not married, I’ll call their mothers, and Kylie and Miranda, and I’ll bring you up before the Women’s Council as an undesirable influence on married and unmarried men. They still remember when you pierced your ear and the Bachelor Club, your swaggering boys’ club, followed suit—every last one… Just get out of town and make it easy on everyone.”
“I don’t like threats and I’ll decide when I’m leaving.” Tanner didn’t like the too-soft snarl to his tone, because that proved she was getting to him. He’d honored his mother his entire life, respected her home; Gwyneth’s low-dog opinion of him nettled.
“Good…decide to leave quick, and I don’t make threats. I make promises, and try not to embarrass your family when you go sniffing after women.” With that, Gwyneth lifted her chin and tromped back around Anna’s house. Gwyneth slammed the door of her van and it roared away. Tanner realized darkly that her threat was the first he’d ever heard from her. His shy, sweet bride of years ago was nothing like the fast-mouthed, hot-tempered woman this morning.
Did it really matter? Tanner wondered bleakly. Why should he care if Gwyneth had threatened him with the worst fate of an unmarried male in Freedom Valley?
He followed the van hurling down Anna’s dirt driveway and out onto the unpaved road leading to the Smith ranch. Across the green patchwork of fields, he turned to view Freedom, a quaint town with a tall white church steeple—where he’d married Gwyneth. Then his view swept the town with its neat, well-tended houses and stores, its town square, cherished by the community and where the spit-and-whittle “boys” of eighty or so, held their meetings.
He inhaled slowly; after eighteen years of intermittent visits, he’d come back to the valley’s traditions and an ex-wife’s threat—“I’ll bring you up before the Women’s Council as an undesirable influence on married and unmarried men…”
Freedom’s Women’s Council was powerful, a tradition established from the single women settlers looking for husbands. Women who would choose their own paths, they’d had to protect themselves from brutish men and had formed a family of women, sisters bonded together.
