the guest bedrooms down here, but it’s for his own good. I’ll stay down here, too, then I can keep an eye on him.”
“He can use the intercom system if he needs you.”
Zack stared down into the box so long, Jenny finally asked, “Zack?”
“Sorry. I was remembering … This isn’t the first time I’ve done something like this.”
She looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”
Did he want to get into this with her? Why not? The past didn’t matter anymore. If she didn’t know the gritty details, maybe it was time. “Dad drank and gambled for as far back as I can remember, then he’d come home and fight with Mom. When I was around ten, I got this mistaken impression that if I went through the house and got rid of some of the liquor, that might make a difference. So I’d take out a bottle here, a bottle there and I’d dump them behind the barn. I couldn’t wipe out the whole cupboard, there would’ve been hell to pay. But at least I felt I was doing something.”
He saw the softening in Jenny’s brown eyes and he knew what that meant. It was pity. He certainly didn’t want her pity, not for the boy he’d been, and certainly not for the man he was now. “That taught me one very important lesson,” he added, suddenly realizing exactly why he was telling her this story. “You can’t make a difference in someone’s life unless they want you to.”
She crossed the hunter green and burgundy Persian rug, rounding a suede and leather sofa. “That’s not true, Zack. Don’t tell me you believe that.”
When she stopped in front of the bar, he focused his gaze on her. “Do you think you’ve made a difference in his life?” He knew Jenny had poured everything she was and everything she could have been into Silas and the Rocky D.
“I have made a difference. Because I’ve become a substitute for you.”
This time there was no pity in her eyes but there was something else he couldn’t decipher. That bothered him. He used to understand Jenny so well … why she yearned for bonds she could depend on.
Jenny’s father had done his duty by her when he’d had to. His love had always been the rodeo. Early on, Jenny had had her mom, but had only seen her dad when he came in from the circuit. After that …
Jenny’s mom had suddenly died of a brain aneurysm when Jenny was eight and her father had been devastated. Jenny had known, even though he wasn’t at home that much, that he and her mom had really loved each other. After a year of Jenny taking care of Charlie, rather than Charlie taking care of her, he’d left her with a neighbor more and more, always chasing a rodeo purse and a dream. That’s the way it had been until Jenny had done an internship on the Rocky D the summer before her senior year in high school. She’d loved horses, handled them expertly and calmed them, showing up his father’s best grooms. His mother had started giving her other responsibilities and had let her handle some of the bookwork. When his mom learned her history, she’d asked Jenny if she wanted to live with them her senior year of high school. Charlie had easily agreed, handing off some of the responsibility for his almost-grown child. Jenny became like a daughter to the Deckers.
Zack’s attraction to Jenny and hers to him had revved up the moment she’d set foot on the Rocky D. Zack had known it wouldn’t be fair to start something with her, when he intended to leave Miners Bluff as soon as he could. Jenny, on the other hand, wore her heart on her sleeve, which had made it easy for him to confide in her, go on long walks and rides, become close to her in a way he’d never been close to a girl before. The night of their high school graduation, they’d gone to the all-night party, come home around 3:00 a.m. and climbed up to the hayloft, which had become their private place. They’d been so excited. He’d won the National Young Filmmakers Scholarship and his dad had hired her to be one of his horse trainers and handlers. In that excitement, their threshold of restraint had fallen low. They’d made love in that hayloft. He’d asked her to go with him to L.A. She’d refused. That had been the end of them.
“You didn’t have to be a substitute for anyone,” Zack protested, feeling as if she were blaming him for something about her life, too.
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to be here, because I did. But I also realized that after your mother died, Silas gave up on the idea that you’d ever come back.”
Staying in this house again, recollections from that difficult time in Zack’s life pummeled him. As he’d tried to do since he’d returned, he shoved them away. “Even if Mom hadn’t died, I doubt if I would have come back. When she visited me in L.A., she made sure to tell me she was proud—of me, of my work … But have you forgotten that when I left for film school, my father cut me off? He didn’t want to know how the classes were, or what kind of projects I was doing. He didn’t want to know if I was successful. He just didn’t care. He’d planned for me to take his place someday. He blamed her for my absence because she gave me my first video camera.”
Jenny leaned closer, the bar still a barrier between them. “You’re both carrying too many shadows from the past. It’s time to let go of all of it.”
Just a whiff of Jenny’s perfume unsettled Zack and lit fires he’d rather douse. “What about your dad, Jenny? Have you let go of all of it?” He saw immediately that he’d struck home and he shouldn’t have. He shook his head. “I had no right to ask that.”
With a sigh, she leaned away. “Maybe you did. After all, I’m giving you advice.”
With a shrug, he admitted, “I have no advice, not about fathers and their kids.” Closing the top of the carton, he taped it then started filling another.
Finally she said, “I’ve learned something over the years, Zack. I do have to accept reality. Wishing my dad would change only brought me heartache, so I accept him for who he is and don’t expect anything. That way I don’t get hurt.”
Her acceptance of her own father’s shortcomings made him feel like a jerk. He shouldn’t have complained about the childhood he’d had when Jenny’s had been so much worse. Losing her mom as a kid couldn’t have been easy. Staying with a neighbor who really wasn’t interested in babysitting while her father was gone had to have made Jenny feel unwanted.
She proved that as she told him, “After Mom died and I had to stay with Mildred when Dad left for the circuit, I disappeared into the library downtown and learned everything I could about horses … to fill up my life and I guess my heart, too. I didn’t have the guts to come to a place like the Rocky D to learn what I needed to know to become a horse trainer, but I went to smaller ranches, asked if I could help with chores and got paid enough to buy clothes for school. I didn’t care about the money as much as I just wanted to be around the animals, to know more about them. Some of those horses were my best friends until I went to high school and really got to know Mikala and Celeste. Up until then I shied away from the other girls because I felt they made fun of me … and looked down on me. Celeste and I had a lot in common because we were both girls from the wrong side of the tracks. I’m not sure how Mikala hooked up with us, maybe because her mother wasn’t around much when she was growing up. But they became my safety net—they were always there for me. How did you and Dawson and Clay become friends?”
“The reverse of you and Celeste and Mikala, I guess. Our families went back to the founding fathers of Miners Bluff. In one way or another, we were all rebelling against authority, against our fathers, our families. Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t talk about it. Guys didn’t do that.” He shot her a wry grin. “But we knew we all wanted to be independent and forge our own course, no matter what
